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DUKE 
UNIVERSITY 


LIBRARY 


APOSTOLIC OPTIMISM 


By Rev. J. H. JOWETT, p.p. 


Apostolic Optimism 

The Eagle Life 

The Friend on the Road 

The Preacher: His Life and Work 
Brooks by the Traveller’s Way 
Thirsting for the Springs 

The Redeemed Family of God 


NEW YORK: GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 


APOSTOLIC 
OPTIMISM 


BY 
Rev. J. H. JOWETT, p.p. 


GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY. 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED S: 


CONTENTS 


PaGE 
1, APOSTOLIC OPTIMISM . : A ‘ ~ I 


‘* Rejoicing in hope.”—-ROMANS xii. 12. 


2. THE TRUE IMPERIALISM F = - 19 


‘Ho, every one that thirsteth !”—IsAIAH lv. 1. 


3. “BEWARE OF THE Docs” . - : SPARSE 


** Beware of the dogs, beware of the evil workers, 
beware of the concision : for we are the circumcision, 
which worship God in the spirit, and rejoice in Christ 
Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh.”-~PHILIP- 
PIANS ili. 2, 3. 


4. WHAT IS WORLDLINESS? . : : rea 4 


‘*T pray not that Thou shouldest take them out of 
the world, but that Thou shouldest keep them from 
the evil.” JOHN xvii. 15. 


5. “UNDER His WINGS”. . ‘ : ; 59 


** He shall cover thee with His feathers, and under 
His wings shalt thou trust: His truth shall be thy 
shield and buckler. Thou shalt not be afraid for the 
terror by night, nor for the arrow that flieth by day, 
nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness, nor 
for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.”— 
PSALMS xci. 4-6. 


vi CONTENTS 


6. THE POWER OF THE CROSS. . S 


“For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek 
after wisdom : but we preach Christ crucified, unto the 
Jews a stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks foolish- 
ness ; but unto them which are called, both Jews and 
Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of 
God,”—1 CORINTHIANS i. 22. 


7. REST FOR WEARY FEET 3 ‘ b ‘ 


‘I will give you rest.”—-MATTHEW xi. 28. 


8. STARTLING ABSENCES . , : ‘ : 


‘*He shall not strive, nor cry, neither shall any 
man hear His voice in the streets. A bruised reed 
shall He not break, and smoking flax shall He not 
quench.” MATTHEW xii. 19, 


g. THE ENERGY OF GRACE : : : 
"Tn whom we have redemption through His blood, 
the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His 
grace, wherein He hath abounded towards us in all 
wisdom and prudence.”—-EPHESIANS i, 7, 8. 

10. THE PERSISTENT INFLUENCE OF FIRST IDEAS 
‘*T have yet many things to say unto you, but ye 

cannot bear them now.”—JOHN xvi. 12. 

11. THE MIRAGE AND THE POOL c 


“The mirage shall become a pool.” —ISAIAH 
XXXV. 7. 


PAGE 


87 


99 


126 


144 


CONTENTS 
12. “CONCERNING THE COLLECTION” : 

**O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is 
thy victory? The sting of death is sin, and the 
strength of sin is the law; but thanks be to God 
which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus 
Christ. . . . Now concerning the collection.”— 
I CORINTHIANS xv. 553 and xvi. I. 

13. “HE DIED FOR ALL” . 5 “ . e 
2 CORINTHIANS ¥. 15. 
14. THE DAYSPRING . és ; : ; 3 

‘‘ The dayspring from on high hath visited us, to 
give light to them that sit in darkness and in the 
shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of 
peace.” LUKE i. 78, 79. 

15. THE UNBELIEF OF THE FOOL - : é 

‘¢ The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.” 
—PSALMS xiv. I. 

16. THE BAPTISM OF FIRE : : : 

**T baptize you with water . . . He shall baptize 
you with fire.”—MATTHEw iii. It. 

17. ABIDING IN CHRIST . : ‘ 


*T am the vine, ye are the branches. He that 
abideth in Me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth 
much fruit: for without Me ye can do nothing. Ifa 
man abide not in Me, he is cast forth as a branch, and 
is withered; and men gather them, and cast them 
into the fire, and they are burned. If ye abide in Me, 
and My words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, 
and it shall be done unto you.”—JOHN xv. 5-7. 


Vil 


PAGE 


156 


171 


186 


196 


209 


225 


viii CONTENTS 


18. THE GREAT ENFRANCHISEMENT 


“Unto Him that loveth us, and logsed us from our 
sins by His blood ; and He made us to be a Kingdom, 
to be priests unto His God and Father; to Him be 
the glory and the dominion for ever and ever.”— 
REVELATION i. 5. 


19. FORGETTING THE CLEANSING : ; 


‘‘For he that lacketh these things is blind, seeing 
only what is near, having forgotten the cleansing from 
his old sins.”—2 PETER i. 9. 


20. THE SECRETS OF EFFECTIVE PREACHING 


[An Address on preaching delivered before the Free 
Church Congress, Cardiff, March 1901.] 


PAGE 


237 


247 


262 


AP 
i 


APOSTOLIC OPTIMISM 
*€ Rejoicing in hope.” ROMANS xii, 12, 


THAT is a characteristic expression of the fine, 
genial optimism of the Apostle Paul. His eyes 
are always illumined. The cheery tone is never 
absent from his speech. The buoyant and springy 
movement of his life is never changed. The light 
never dies out of his sky. Even the grey firma- 
ment reveals more hopeful tints, and becomes 
significant of evolving glory. The apostle is an 
optimist, “rejoicing in hope,” a child of light 
walking in the 


”» « 


wearing the “armour of light, 
light” even as Christ is in the light. 

This apostolic optimism was not a thin and 
fleeting sentiment begotten of a cloudless summer 
day. It was not the creation of a season; it was 
the permanent pose of the spirit. Even when 


beset with circumstances which to the world would 
B 


2 APOSTOLIC OPTIMISM 


spell defeat, the apostle moved with the mien of 
a conqueror. He never lost the kingly posture. 
He was disturbed by no timidity about ultimate 
issues. He fought and laboured in the spirit of 
certain triumph. “We are always confident.” 
“We are more than conquerors through Him that 
loved us.” “Thanks be unto God who giveth 
us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” 
This apostolic optimism was not born of 
sluggish thinking, or of idle and shallow observa- 
tion. Iam very grateful that the counsel of my 
text lifts its chaste and cheery flame in the 12th 
chapter of an epistle of which the first chapter 
contains as dark and searching an indictment of 
our nature as the mind of man has ever drawn. 
Let me rehearse the appalling catalogue, that the 
radiance of the apostle’s optimism may appear the 
more abounding: “Senseless hearts,” “fools,” 
“uncleanness,” “ vile passions,” “reprobate minds,” 
“unrighteousness, wickedness, covetousness, mali- 
ciousness; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, 
malignity, whisperers, backbiters, hateful to God, 
insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil things, 
without understanding, covenant-breakers, without 
natural affection, unmerciful.” With fearless 
severity the apostle leads us through the black 
realms of midnight and eclipse. And yet in the 


APOSTOLIC OPTIMISM 3 


subsequent reaches of the great argument, of 
which these dark regions form the preface, there 
emerges the clear, calm, steady light of my optim- 
istic text. I say it is not the buoyancy of 
ignorance. It is not the flippant, light-hearted 
expectancy of a man who knows nothing about 
the secret places of the night. The counsellor is 
a man who has steadily gazed at light at its worst, 
who has digged through the outer walls of con- 
vention and respectability, who has pushed his 
way into the secret chambers and closets of the 
life, who has dragged out the slimy sins which 
were lurking in their holes, and named them after 
their kind—it is this man who when he has 
surveyed the dimensions of evil and misery and 
contempt, merges his dark indictment in a cheery 
and expansive dawn, in an optimistic evangel, in 
which he counsels his fellow-disciples to maintain 
the confident, attitude of a rejoicing hope. 

1. Now what are the secrets of this courageous 
and energetic optimism? Perhaps, if we explore 
the life of this great apostle, and seek to discover 
its springs, we may find the clue to his abounding 
hope. Roaming then through the entire records 
of his life and teachings, do we discover any 
significant emphasis? Pre-eminent above all other 
suggestions, I am impressed with his vivid sense of 


4 APOSTOLIC OPTIMISM 


the reality of the redemptive work of Christ. Turn 
where I will, the redemptive work of the Christ 
evidences itself as the base and groundwork of his 
life. It is not only that here and there are solid 
statements of doctrine, wherein some massive 
argument is constructed for the partial unveiling 
of redemptive glory. Even in those parts of his 
epistles where formal argument has ceased, and 
where solid doctrine is absent, the doctrine flows 
as a fluid element into the practical convictions of 
life, and determines the shape and quality of the 
judgments. Nay, one might legitimately use the 
figure of a finer medium still, and say that in all 
the spacious reaches of the apostle’s life the re- 
demptive work of his Master is present as an 
atmosphere in which all his thoughts and purposes 
and labours find their sustaining and enriching 
breath. Take this epistle to the Romans in which 
my text is found. The earlier stages of the great 
epistle are devoted to a massive and stately 
presentation of the doctrines of redemption. But 
when I turn over the pages where the majestic 
argument is concluded, I find the doctrine persist- 
ing in a diffused and rarefied form, and appearing 
as the determining factor in the solution of 
practical problems. If he is dealing with the 
question of the “eating of meats” the great 


» 


APOSTOLIC OPTIMISM 5 


doctrine reappears, and interposes its solemn and 
yet elevating principle: “destroy not him with thy 
meat for whom Christ died.” If he is called upon 
to administer rebuke to the passionate and unclean, 
the shadow of the Cross rests upon his judgment. 
“Ye are not your own; ye are bought with a 
price.” If he is pourtraying the ideal relation- 
ship of husband and wife, he sets it in the light of 
redemptive glory :—“ Husbands, love your wives, 
even as Christ also loved the Church, and gave 
Himself up for it.” If he is seeking to cultivate 
the grace of liberality, he brings the heavenly air 
round about the spirit. “Ye know the grace of 
our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, 
yet for your sakes He became poor.” It inter- 
weaves itself with all his salutations. It exhales 
in all his benedictions like a hallowing fragrance. 
You cannot get away from it. In the light of the 
glory of redemption all relationships are assorted 
and arranged. Redemption was not degraded 
into a fine abstract argument, to which the 
apostle had appended his own approval, and 
then, with sober satisfaction, had laid it aside, 
as a practical irrelevancy, in the stout chests of 
mental orthodoxy. It became the very spirit of 
his life. It was, if I may be allowed the 
violent figure, the warm blood in all his judgment. 


~ 


6 APOSTOLIC OPTIMISM 


It filled the veins of all his thinking. It beat 
like a pulse in all his purposes. It determined 
and vitalised his decisions in the crisis, as well 
as in the lesser trifles of the common day. His 
conception of redemption was regulative of all 
his thought. 

But it is not only the immediacy of redemption 
in the apostle’s thought by which I am impressed. 
I stand in awed amazement before its vast, far- 
stretching reaches into the eternities. Said an 
old villager to me concerning the air of his 
elevated hamlet, “ Aye, sir, it’s a fine air is this 
westerly breeze; I like to think of it as having 
travelled from the distant fields of the Atlantic !” 
And here is the Apostle Paul, with the quickening 
wind of redemption blowing about him in loosen- 
ing, vitalising, strengthening influence, and to him, 
in all his thinking, it had its birth in the distant 
fields of eternity! To the apostle redemption 
was not a small device, an after-thought, a patched- 
up expedient to meet an unforeseen emergency. 
The redemptive purpose lay back in the abyss of 
the eternities, and in a spirit of reverent question- 
ing the apostle sent his trembling thoughts into 
those lone and silent fields) He emerged with 
whispered secrets such as those: “ fore-knew,” 
“fore-ordained,” “chosen in Him _ before the 


~ 


APOSTOLIC OPTIMISM 7 


foundation of the world,” “eternal life promised 
before times eternal,” “the eternal purpose which 
He purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord.” 

Brethren, does our common thought of re- 
demptive glory reach back into this august and 
awful presence? Does the thought of the modern 
disciple journey in this distant pilgrimage? Or 
do we now regard it as unpractical and irrelevant ? 
There is no more insidious peril in modern 
religious life than the debasement of our concep- 
tion of the practical. If we divorce the practical 
from the sublime, the practical will become the 
superficial, and will degenerate into a very lean 
and forceless thing. When Paul went on this 
lonely pilgrimage his spirit acquired the posture 
of a finely sensitive reverence. People who live 
and move beneath great domes acquire a certain 
calm and stately dignity. It is in companionship 
with the sublimities that awkwardness and 
coarseness are destroyed. We lose our reverence 
when we desert the august. But has reverence 
no relationship to the practical? Shall we 
discard it as an irrelevant factor in the wealthy 
purposes of common life? Why, reverence is the 
very clue to fruitful, practical living. Reverence 
is creative of hope; nay, a more definite em- 
phasis can be given to the assertion ; reverence is 


8 APOSTOLIC OPTIMISM 


a constituent of hope. Annihilate reverence, and 
life loses its fine sensitiveness, and when sensitive- 
ness goes out of a life the hope that remains is 
only a flippant rashness, a thoughtless impetuosity, 
the careless onrush of the kine, and not a firm 
assured perception of a triumph that is only 
delayed. A reverent homage before the sub- 
limities of yesterday is the condition of a fine 
perception of the hidden triumphs of the morrow. 
And, therefore, I do not regard it as an accidental 
conjunction that the Psalmist puts them to- 
gether, and proclaims the evangel that “the Lord 
taketh pleasure in them that /ear Him, in them 
that ope in His mercy.” To feel the days 
before me I must revere the purpose which 
throbs behind me. I must bow in reverence if I 
would anticipate in hope. 

Here, then, is the Apostle Paul, with the 
redemptive purpose interweaving itself with all 
the entanglements of his common life, a purpose 
reaching back into the awful depths of the 
eternities, and issuing from those depths in 
amazing fulness of grace and glory. No one can 
be five minutes in the companionship of the 
Apostle Paul without discovering how wealthy is 
his sense of the wealthy, redeeming ministry of 
God. What a wonderful consciousness he has of 


APOSTOLIC OPTIMISM 9 


the sweep and fulness of the divine grace! You 
know the variations of the glorious air: “the 
unsearchable riches of Christ”; “riches in glory 
_in Christ Jesus”; “all spiritual blessings in the 
heavenly places in Christ”; “the riches of His 
goodness and forbearance and long-suffering.” 
The redemptive purpose of God bears upon the 
life of the apostle and upon the race whose 
privileges he shares, not in an uncertain and 
reluctant shower, but in a great and marvellous 
flood. And what to him is the resultant en- 
franchisement? What are the spacious issues of 
the glorious work? Do you recall those wonder- 
ful sentences, scattered here and there about the 
apostle’s writings, and beginning with the words 
“but now”? Each sentence proclaims the end 
of the dominion of night, and unveils some 
glimpse of the new created day. “But now!” 
It is a phrase that heralds a great deliverance! 
“But now, apart from the law the righteousness 
of God hath been manifested.” “But now, being 
made free from sin and become servants to God.” 
“ But now in Christ Jesus ye that once were far 
off are made nigh in the blood of Christ.” “But 
now are ye light in the Lord.” “Now, no 
condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.” 
These represent no thin abstractions. To Paul 


10 APOSTOLIC OPTIMISM 


the realities of which they speak were more real 
than the firm and solid earth. And is it any 
wonder that a man with such a magnificent sense 
of the reality of the redemptive works of Christ, 
who felt the eternal purpose throbbing in the 
dark backward and abyss of time, who conceived 
it operating upon our race in floods of grace and 
glory, and who realised in his own immediate 
consciousness the varied wealth of the resultant 
emancipation—is it any wonder that for this man 
a new day had dawned, and the birds had begun 
to sing and the flowers to bloom, and a sunny 
optimism had taken possession of his heart which 
found expression in an assured and rejoicing 
hope ? 

2. I look abroad again over the record of this 
man’s life and teachings, if perchance I may 
discover the secrets of his abiding optimism, and 
I am profoundly impressed by his living sense of 
the reality and greatness of his present resources. 
“By Christ redeemed!” Yes, but that is only 
the Alpha and not the Omega of the work of 
grace. “By Christ redeemed!” That is not a 
grand finale; it is only a glorious inauguration. 
“By Christ redeemed ; in Christ restored”; it is 
with these dynamics of restoration that his epistles 
are so wondrously abounding. In almost every 


APOSTOLIC OPTIMISM 11 


other sentence he suggests a dynamic which he 
can count upon as his friend. Paul’s mental and 
spiritual outlook comprehended a great army of 
positive forces labouring in the interests of the 
Kingdom of God. His conception of life was 
amazingly rich in friendly dynamics! I do not 
wonder that such a wealthy consciousness was 
creative of a triumphant optimism. Just glance 
at some of the apostle’s auxiliaries: ‘“ Christ 
liveth in me!” “Christ liveth in me! He 
breathes through all my aspirations, He thinks 
through all my thinking. He wills through all 
my willing. He loves through all my loving. 
He travails in all my labours. He works within 
me ‘to will and to do of His good pleasure.” 
That is the primary faith of the hopeful life. But 
see what follows in swift and immediate succession. 
“If Christ is in you, the spirit is life.” “The 
spirit is life!” And therefore you find that in the 
apostle’s thought dispositions are powers. They 
are not passive entities. They are positive forces 
vitalising and energising the common life of men. 
My brethren, I am persuaded there is a perilous 
leakage in this department of our thought. We 
are not bold enough in our thinking concerning 
spiritual realities. We do not associate with 
every mode of the consecrated spirit the mighty 


12 APOSTOLIC OPTIMISM 


energy of God. We too often oust from our 
practical calculations some of the strongest and 
most aggressive allies of the saintly life. Meek- 
ness is more than the absence of self-assertion ; it 
is the manifestation of the mighty power of God. 
To the Apostle Paul love expressed more than 
a relationship. It was an energy productive of 
abundant labours. Faith was more than an 
attitude. It was an energy creative of mighty 
endeavour. Hope was more than a posture. It 
was an energy generative of a most enduring 
patience. All these are dynamics, to be counted 
as active allies, co-operating in the ministry of the 
kingdom. And so the epistles abound in the 
recital of mystic ministries at work. The Holy 
Spirit worketh! Grace worketh! Faith 
worketh! Love worketh! Hope worketh! 
Prayer worketh! And there are other allies 
robed in less attractive garb. “ Tribulation 
worketh!” “This light affliction worketh.” 
“Godly sorrow worketh!” On every side of 
him the apostle conceives co-operative and 
friendly powers. “ The mountain is full of horses 
and chariots of fire round about him.” He 
exults in the consciousness of abounding re- 
sources. He discovers the friends of God in 
things which find no place among the scheduled 


APOSTOLIC OPTIMISM 13 


powers of the world. He finds God’s raw 
material in the world’s discarded waste. “Weak 
things,” “ base things,” “things that are despised,” 
“things that are not,” mere nothings; among 
these he discovers the operating agents of the 
mighty God, Is it any wonder that in this man, 
possessed of such a wealthy consciousness of 
multiplied resources, the spirit of a cheery 
optimism should be enthroned? With what 
stout confidence he goes into the fight! He 
never mentions the enemy timidly. He never 
seeks to underestimate his strength. Nay, again 
and again he catalogues all possible antagonisms 
in a spirit of buoyant and exuberant triumph. 
However numerous the enemy, however subtle 
and aggressive his devices, however towering and 
well-established the iniquity, however black the 
gathering clouds, so sensitive is the apostle to 
the wealthy resources of God that amid it all he 
remains a sunny optimist, “rejoicing in hope,” 
labouring in the spirit of a conqueror even when 
the world was exulting in his supposed discom- 
fiture and defeat. 

3. And, finally, in searching for the springs of 
this man’s optimism, I place alongside his sense 
of the reality of redemption and his wealthy con- 
sciousness of present resources, his impressive 


14 APOSTOLIC OPTIMISM 


- 


sense of the reality of future glory. Paul gave 
himself time to think of heaven, of the home of 
God, of his own home when time should be no 
more. He loved to contemplate “the glory that 
shall be revealed.” He mused in wistful expec- 
tancy of the day “when Christ who is our life shall 
be manifested,” and when we also “shall be mani- 
fested with Him in glory.” He pondered the 
thought of death as “gain,” as transferring him 
to conditions in which he would be “at home 
with the Lord,” “ with Christ, which is far better.” 
He looked for “the blessed hope and appearing 
of the glory of our great God and Saviour Jesus 
Christ,” and he contemplated “that great day” as 
the “ henceforth,’ which would reveal to him the 
crown of righteousness and glory. Is any one 
prepared to dissociate this contemplation from 
the apostle’s cheery optimism? Is not rather 
the thought of coming glory one of its abiding 
springs? Can we safely exile it from our moral 
and spiritual culture? I know that this particular 
contemplation is largely absent from modern 
religious life, and I know the nature of the recoil 
in which our present impoverishment began. “ Let 
us hear less about the mansions of the blest, and 
more about the housing of the poor!” Men re- 
volted against an effeminate contemplation, which 


- 


APOSTOLIC OPTIMISM 15 


had run to seed, in favour of an active philan- 
thropy which sought the enrichment of the common 
life. But, my brethren, pulling a plant up and 
throwing it upon the dung-heap is not the only 
way of saving it from running to seed. You can 
accomplish by a wise restriction what is waste- 
fully done by severe destruction. I think we 
have lost immeasurably by the uprooting, in so 
many lives, of this plant of heavenly contem- 
plation. We have built on the erroneous assump- 
tion that the contemplation of future glory 
inevitably unfits us for the service of man. It is 
an egregious and destructive mistake. I do not 
think that Richard Baxter’s labours wete thinned 
or impoverished by his contemplation of “the 
saints’ everlasting rest.” When I consider his 
mental output, his abundant labours as Father- 
confessor to a countless host, his pains and per- 
secutions and imprisonments, I cannot but think 
he received some of the powers of his optimistic 
endurance from contemplations such as he counsels 
in his incomparable book. “Run familiarly 
through the streets of the heavenly Jerusalem ; 
visit the patriarchs and prophets, salute the 
apostles, and admire the armies of martyrs; lead 
on the heart from street to street, bring it into 
the palace of the great King; lead it, as it were, 


16 APOSTOLIC OPTIMISM 


from chamber to chamber. Say to it, ‘Here must 
I lodge, here must I die, here must I praise, here 
must I love and be loved. My tears will then be 
wiped away, my groans be turned to another 
tune, my cottage of clay be changed to this 
palace, my prison rags to these splendid robes’; 
‘for the former things are passed away.” I 
cannot think that Samuel Rutherford impover- 
ished his spirit or deadened his affections, or 
diminished his labours by mental pilgrimages 
such as he counsels to Lady Cardoness :—* Go 
up beforehand and see your lodging. Look 
through all your Father’s rooms in Heaven. Men 
take a sight of the lands ere they buy them. I 
know that Christ hath made the bargain already ; 
but be kind to the house ye are going to, and see 
it often.” I cannot think that this would imperil 
the fruitful optimisms of the Christian life. I 
often examine,,with peculiar interest, the hymn- 
book we use at Carr’s Lane. It was compiled by 
Dr. Dale. Nowhere else can I find the broad 
perspective of his theology and his primary help- 
meets in the devotional life as I find them there, 
And is it altogether unsuggestive that under the 
heading of “Heaven” is to be found one of the 
largest sections of the book. A greater space 
is given to “ Heaven” than is given to “Christian 


APOSTOLIC OPTIMISM 17 


duty.” Is it not significant of what a great 
man of affairs found needful for the enkindling 
and sustenance of a courageous hope? And 
among the hymns are many which have helped 
to nourish the sunny endeavours of a countless 
host. 
There is a land of pure delight 
Where saints immortal reign ; 


Infinite day excludes the night, 
And pleasures banish pain. 


What are these, arrayed in white, 
3righter than the noonday sun? 

Foremost of the suns of light, 
Nearest the eternal throne. 


Hark! hark, my soul! Angelic songs are swelling 
O’er earth’s green fields and ocean’s wave-beat shore. 
Angelic songs to sinful men are telling 
Of that new life when sin shall be no more. 


My brethren, depend upon it, we are not im- 
poverished by contemplations such as _ these, 
They take no strength out of the hand, and they 
put much strength and buoyancy into the heart. 
I proclaim the contemplation of coming glory as 
one of the secrets of the apostle’s optimism which 
enabled him to labour and endure in the con- 
fident spirit of rejoicing hope. These, then, are 


some of the springs of Christian optimism ; some 
c 


18 APOSTOLIC OPTIMISM 


of the sources in which we may nourish our hope 
in the newer labours of a larger day :—a sense of 
the glory of the past in a perfected redemption, a 
sense of the glory of the present in our multiplied 
resources, a sense of the glory of to-morrow in 
the fruitful rest of our eternal home. 


O, blessed hope! with this elate 

Let not our hearts be desolate ; 

But, strong in faith and patience, wait 
Until He coms! 


ih 


THE TRUE IMPERIALISM 
‘© Ho, every one that thirsteth |!”—ISAIAH lv. 


WHO are those thirsty souls, panting for a satis- 
faction which they do not find? They are the 
people of the hill-country, now exiled to the 
plains. They have been bereft of the companion- 
able apocalypse of the heights, and they are now 
immured in the unsuggestive monotony of the 
plains. The heights abounded in speech, The 
plains are silent. There is not a single helpful 
figure in the entire Bible borrowed from the plains, 
The plains lie prone as a speechless sphinx. The 
hill-country is full of voices, loud in intimations 
and revelations. Its phenomena are the messen- 
gers of the infinite. There towers the rugged 
height, firm and immovable, standing sure and 
steadfast through the fickle and varied years, 
What is its suggestion? “ Thy righteousness is 
like the great mountains.” Yonder come the 


20 THE TRUE IMPERIALISM 


treasure-laden clouds, driving in from the great 
sea. They unburden their wealth’ upon | the 
shoulders of Carmel, clothing it with a garment 
of rare and luxuriant beauty. What is their 
significance? “Thy mercy reached even unto 
the clouds.” Here, on these bare, basaltic heights, 
the tired and heated traveller rests in the cool 
and healing shadow of a friendly rock. What is 
the speech of the shadow? “He that dwelleth in 
this secret place of the Most High shall abide 
under the shadow of the Almighty.” 

All things are but the vestures and vehicles of 
larger things of spiritual import. The light, soft 
wind that stirs and breathes in the dawn—it is 
God who rides upon a cherub, yea, who “ flies 
upon the wings of the wind.” The gentle, molli- 
fying rain falling upon the parched, bruised, 
bleeding stems of the newly-cut grass: “ He shall 
come down like rain upon the mown grass.” The 
end of the drought ; the unsealing of the springs 
among the hills ; the gladsome sound of the river 
as it laughs and dances down the bare and rocky 
gorge: “Thou shalt make them drink of the 
river of Thy pleasures.” It was an expressive, 
voiceful land. Its features interpreted the face 
and character of God. Land and people were in 
communion, and their intercourse concerned the 


THE TRUE IMPERIALISM 21 


nearness and the favour and the providence of 
the Lord of Hosts. But now the land and the 
people are divorced. The people are borne away 
into captivity. They leave the hill-country, so 
rich in interpreting speech, and they pass into the 
speechless monotony of the plains. Their en- 
vironment is dumb. Their dwelling-place is no 
longer a sacrament. It is common and insignifi- 
cant. They have passed from nature to art and 
artifice. They have left the shepherd, and met 
the merchant. The quiet labours of the pasture 
and the vineyard are effaced by the pompous 
show and glitter of a swift and feverish civilisation. 
Away in the hill-country the lanes were flooded 
with rivers of sheep. Look through the symbols 
of Ezekiel, and you can see the streets and lanes 
of the exile: “chariots like whirlwinds,” “ horses 
swifter than eagles,” “horses and chariots,” “ horse- 
men with spears and burnished helmets,” “ wheels " 
and “wheels” and “wheels,” all. suggesting the 
street rush and the irresistible power of the 
triumphant city. Go into the book of Daniel, 
and you can hear its gaiety and its revelry: “the 
sound of the cornet, flute, harp, sackbut, psaltery, 
and dulcimer.” You can see its rivers, broad and 
brimming, the rivers by which the exiles sat 
down and wept. You can see its spacious 


22 THE TRUE IMPERIALISM 


estuary, the “desert of the sea,” the “great sea,* 
crowded with shipping, laden with the produce 
of India and Arabia, and the wealth of distant 
Britain. Ezekiel has described it as a “land of 
traffic,” a “city of merchants,” keen, intense, 
open-eyed, and pushful. The emphasis of its life 
gathered round about its trade. Its energy was 
bent upon acquisition and expansion. “ Their 
cry was in their ships.” 

Now, take the people of the bracing, speaking 
hill-country, and immure them in this sweltering 
and superficial plain. In all the crowded interests 
there was nothing suggestive of God. In all the 
rushing, hurrying movements there was nothing 
significant of the coming and going of God. 
There was grandeur, but the grandeur had no 
voice. It was grandeur without revelation, and 
grandeur without revelation is never creative of 
awe. Where there is no awe, men step with 
flippant tread. The exile felt the glamour, but in 
the glamour forgot his God. The glitter allured 
him. The snake breathed out its tinted bubbles, 
and he followed in pursuit. He became a 
trafficker, and plunged his soul in trade. The 
instinct of the dealer rapidly matured. His eyes 
became heated with ever-increasing lust. His 
vision was more and more horizontal, and less 


THE TRUE IMPERIALISM 23 


and less vertical. The fever of the conqueror 
infected the captive. The spirit of Babylon 
entered into Israel. Success was enthroned in 
place of holiness, and the soul bowed down and 
worshipped it. The exile embraced the world, 
and shut out the infinite. 

Now, what was the issue of that? The exile 
made money. He increased it by increased trade. 
He amassed possessions. His body revelled in 
conditions of ease. His carnal appetites delighted 
themselves in fatness. He climbed into positions 
of eminence and power. What else? “In the 
fulness of his sufficiency he was in straits.” The 
body luxuriated; the soul languished. He 
drenched the body with comforts; he couldn’t 
appease its tenant. “Soul, thou hast much goods 
laid up ... eat, drink, and be merry!” And 
still the soul cried out, “I thirst,’ and disturbed 
him like an unquiet ghost. He spent money and 
more money, but was never able to buy the 
appropriate bread. He plunged into increased 
labours, but his labours reaped only that “ which 
satisfied not.” The body toiled, the brain 
schemed, the eyes coveted, and still the soul cried 
out, “I thirst. 

Now, brethren, when there sits in the soul a 
hungry unrest and a feverish thirst, life will drop 


24 THE TRUE IMPERIALISM 


into faintness and weariness. You remember 
that striking conjunction in the first of the Psalms: 
“He shall be like a tree planted by rivers of 
water. . . . His leaf also shall not wither.” That 
is a beautiful sequence. When there is no thirst 
at the roots there shall be no withering of the 
leaf. What is the leaf? The leaf is the early 
thing, the spring growth, the beauty of the child- 
hood of the year. And what is the leaf in human 
life? The first thing, the thing of the spring, the 
beauty of the earliest days. And what is the 
beauty of childhood? Surely its hopefulness, its 
trustfulness, its love. These are the spring-leaves 
of human life. ‘“ His leaf shall not wither.” Even 
on into the autumn-time his leaf shall still be 
green. In old age he shall still be hopeful, 
trustful, loveful. No thirst at the roots; no 
withering of the leaf. But suppose there is thirst 
at the roots? Then life shall faint and droop. 
The fresh green thing shall fade away. The leaf 
shall wither. Hope shall wither into pessimism. 
Faith shall wither into cynicism. Love shall 
wither into misanthropy. And, brethren, where 
the leaf has drooped the life becomes weary. All 
things become stale, flat, and unprofitable. We 
“spend our money for that which is not bread, 
and we labour for that which satisfieth not.” 


THE TRUE IMPERIALISM 25 


“ All is vanity and vexation of spirit.” The soul 
which is unmoved in the finite feeds itself upon 
wind. We run and are weary; we walk and are 
faint. 

Has all this no pertinency for our own day? 
Is the snake triumphant in our time? Are our 
people in pursuit of the bubble? Is our vision 
entirely horizontal? Which is predominant— 
aspiration or ambition? Which is more coveted 
—success or holiness? Would it be an altogether 
irrelevant quotation to apply the words of the text 
to our own people, and to say that we “spend our 
money for that which is not bread, and we labour 
for that which satisfieth not”? Acquisition and 
expansion are the primary notes of modern life. 
The lust of gold and the lust of empire are the 
twin ambitions of our time. The personal and 
the national glory-business, both appear to be 
briskly pushed. And is there no thirst, no dis- 
quietude of spirit, no vague unrest, no drooping 
leaf? Are there no weary feet? Do you find the 
green leaf in our literature, or is our literature 
pervaded by a faint and weary spirit? I should 
not go to our novels if I wished to find a strong 
and fruitful rest. Nor do I think our poetry 
moves amid the “still dews of quietness,” and the 
composure of an optimistic faith. Our novels and 


26 THE TRUE IMPERIALISM 


our poetry are full of the drooping leaf. Behind 
the droop there is the thirst. The literature 
reflects the people. Business circles abound in 
faint and weary men. They get and spend, and 
spend and get, but through it all persists the 
inward thirst. They toil and tire, but their labour 
satisfieth not. At the end of the feast the hunger 
is unappeased. What is the explanation? 
“Why art thou cast down, O my soul, and why 
art thou disquieted within me? Thou hast 
rivers of pleasure!” “I thirst.” “Thou hast 
abundance of goods.” “I hunger.” What is 
to be the remedy? Where is the satisfaction 
to be found? 


Where is the singer, whose large note and clear 
Can heal and arm and plenish and sustain? 


So cries William Watson, and I want no better 
words with which to express the need. A faint 
and weary people is in need of some one who can 
“heal and arm and plenish and sustain,” but that 
some one will not be found in a singer, however 
large and clear his note, but in a Saviour; not in 
a gift of poetry, but in the gift of life; not in 
any inspired man, but in the infinitely gracious 
ministries of an unveiled God. 

“Ho, every one that thirsteth!” That is 


“THE TRUE IMPERIALISM 27 


a call to the faint and the weary. What is 
he to do? “Incline your ear.” “Hearken dili- 
gently unto me.” First of all there has to 
be a discipline of the ear. There has to be 
a determined and resolute effort to listen to 
God. “Hear, ye deaf.” You know the space 
which these injunctions fill in the sacred Book. 
On every page there sounds the cry of the herald, 
“Hearken!” “Listen!” “Incline your ear.” 
How often our Master repeated the phrase, “ He 
that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” The 
counsel is urgent, sharp, strenuous, as though 
shouted to a man in the gravest peril: “Let him 
hear!” The voices of the world are so plausible, 
so fascinating, so easily seducing, that if a man is 
to catch the higher voice he must set himself in 
the resolute act of attention. ‘“ Hearken diligently 
unto me.” Put some work into your listening ! 
In the senate, in the council-house, on the ex- 
change, behind the counter, in the study, in the 
pulpit, be intent on hearing the highest, and 
incline your ear unto God. Many clamorous 
voices will call you from beneath—Mr. Worldly 
Wiseman, Mr. Pliable, Mr. Time-Server, Mr. Love- 
the - World — but pull yourself together, and 
intently listen, that through the noisy clamour 
you may hear the upward callings of your God. 


28 THE TRUE IMPERIALISM 


“ Hearken diligently unto me.” For the individual 
and for the nation the discipline of the ear is 
the first step to the attainment of a strong, restful, 
unwearied, and satisfying life. 

What is the next step? The discipline of 
the ear is to be accompanied by the discipline 
of the heart. Listen, and then yield. “Let 
the wicked forsake his way, and the unright- 
eous man his thoughts.” Right hearing necessi- 
tates strong and unequivocal doing. Know, 
and then dare! Hear the highest, and then 
uncompromisingly obey it. “Yes, but that 
is impossible!” Ah, you remember what Robert 
South said: “It is idleness that creates impossi- 
bilities.” That is very true. When men make a 
real work of their religion, impossibilities melt 
away into glorious practicalities. When Richard 
Cobden began his agitation for the repeal of the 
Corn Laws, he was met on every hand with the 
objection that he was attempting the impossible. 
“Impossible,” said Cobden ; “if Dickie the only 
objection it can soon be donate: Pio that 
perhaps one of the greatest nendeet the-world 
to-day is that some great naga 
voice of the highest, shalt ‘tend forward and 
resolutely attempt the impossible. Let her begin 


by divesting herself of all unclean habits, of every- 


THE TRUE IMPERIALISM 29 


thing that is tricky and perfidious and subtle and 
selfish and false. “Let the wicked’ forsake her 
ways.” Let her strip herself of all sordid ambi- 
tions, of all mean purposes, of all sneaking policies 
and small conceits. “Let the unrighteous forsake 
her thoughts.” Let her “hearken diligently” to 
the divine, and determinedly follow in pursuit, 
even when the way of pursuit appears to lead to 
impossible heights. Let her “return to the Lord,” 
and be no longer a democracy, or an aristocracy, 
or a plutocracy, but a theocracy, willingly and 
gladly counselled and governed by Jehovah, Lord 
of Hosts. 

What would be the issues of such obedience ? 
They are unfolded for us in this chapter with 
wondrous prodigality. First of all, there is the 
assured promise of a fuller life. “Your sou/ shall 
live.” “Your soul!” Hitherto life has been a 
thin existence, a mere surface glitter, a superficial 
movement. Now, vitality shall awaken in un- 
dreamed-of depths. “Your soul shall live.” Life 
shall no longer be confined to the channels of the 
appetites, to mere sensations, to the outer halls 
and passages of the sacred house. “Your soul 
shall live.” The unused shall be aroused and 
exercised. Unevolved faculty shall be unpacked. 
Benumbed instincts shall be liberated. Barren 


30 THE TRUE IMPERIALISM 


powers of discernment shall troop from their. : 
graves. New intelligences shall be born. The 
ocean of iniquity shall ebb, and “the sea shall 
give up its dead”! “Your soul shall live.” Life 
shall be no longer scant and scrimpy. Your soul 
shall “ delight itself in fatness.” Every tissue shall 
be fed. Weakness shall depart with the famine. 
“The people that do know their God shall be 
strong.” The tree of its life shall bear all manner 
of fruits, and “the leaves of the tree shall be for 
the healing of the nations.” Mark the succession. 
Here is a people, diligently listening to the 
highest, and as diligently yielding to it. The 
inevitable issue is a deepened, enriched, and glori- 
fied life. “Your soul shall live.’ See, now, the 
further issue. “Behold, thou shalt call a nation 
that thou knewest not, and nations that knew not 
thee shall run unto thee, because of the Lord thy 
God, for He hath glorified thee.” What does that 
mean? It means that a true and _ glorified 
natural life is to create a true and glorified 
Imperialism. “Nations that knew not thee shall 
run unto thee because of the Lord thy God.” 
That is the true imperialism—-empire by moral 
and spiritual sovereignty, allurement and dominion 
by the fascinating radiance of a pure and sancti- 
fied life. “Gentiles shall come to thy Zgh#, and 


THE TRUE IMPERIALISM 31 


kings to the brightness of thy rising.” What is 
the vulgar imperialism of to-day? It is empire 
by grab. It is expansion by coercion. It is 
aggrandisement by the power of the sword. 
Mark the contrast. “Nations that knew not 
thee shall run unto thee because of the Lord thy 
God.” Such is to be the imperial gravitation of a 
people exalted and inspired by the purifying and 
energising presence of the Eternal God. This, 
I repeat, is the true imperialism, the imperialism 
which I covet for my nation; the glory which 
constitutes a fadeless dignity ; empire—not by the 
aid of Maxim guns, but by great and heartening 
evangels proceeding from a redeemed and glorified 
people. When are we going to learn that this is 
the shining goal of all worthy national ambition ? 
The mission of a truly great people is to be “a 
witness to the peoples, a leader and commander to 
the peoples,” a “witness,” ceaselessly reiterating 
the glad tidings of the eternal love which she her- 
self has proved in the power of her own redemp- 
tion ; a “leader,” a pathfinder, going out among 
the benighted peoples who are groping blindly for 
the way that leads to liberty and light, and 
revealing unto them the road whose entrance- 
gate is the beginning of the gladsome dawn; a 
“commander,” commanding her willing and waiting 


32 THE TRUE IMPERIALISM 


servants to go here, there, and yonder, bearing 
her shining lines through all the earth, and her 
words to the end of the world. “Thou shalt 
be called the restorer of paths to dwell in.” That 
is a glorious title, and it describes a glorious 
mission, the inevitable mission of a great nation 
which has “hearkened diligently” unto God, and 
has surrendered herself to a glad and invincible 
obedience. “Her soul shall live,” and her life 
shall be “the light of men.” A splendid magna- 
nimity! Now, mark the further issues in this 
radiant sequence. A true imperialism is to be 
accompanied by a splendid magnanimity. Little- 
mindedness is to be supplanted by clean and 
spacious ambition. The pure and exalted people 
is to be partaker of the sublime thoughts and 
purposes of God. “My thoughts are not your 
thoughts.” What are Thy thoughts like,O Lord? 
“ As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are 
my thoughts higher than your thoughts.” The 
thoughts of the Eternal are characterised by lofti- 
ness, by breadth, by comprehensiveness, by an all- 
inclusive sympathy which vibrates to the interests 
of each, as though each contained, as indeed it 
does, the welfare of the whole. The truly im- 
perial people is to share this spacious and 
inclusive thought. Small parochial prejudices 


THE TRUE IMPERIALISM 33 


and petty peddling ambitions will give way to 
wide-seeing and far-embracing sympathy. A 
sterile individualism will yield to a pregnant 
altruism. A mean and feverish patriotism will be 
supplanted by a generous and fructifying cosmo- 
politanism. The annexation of territories will be 
regarded as infinitely inferior to the salvation of 
the world. Influence will not be measured by 
miles, but by magnanimity ; empire will not be 
computed by so many leagues of earth, but by the 
multitude of redeemed and liberated souls; the 
outskirts of sovereignty will not be defined by 
bristling guns, but “thou shalt call her walls Sal- 
vation, and her gates Praise.” “As the heavens 
are high above the earth,” so shall thy thoughts 
be exalted above the low-lying purposes of carnal 
policy and merely material ambition. 

And now note the climax of the sequence. 
All this exalted and glorified character, this true 
imperialism, this splendid magnanimity, is to 
issue in a rich, assured, and beautiful ministry. 
There is to be nothing wavering and uncertain 
about the moral empire and sovereignty of 
such a people. Its healthy and health-giving 
ministry shall be inevitable. “As the rain 
cometh down, and the snow, from heaven, .. . 


and watereth the earth, and maketh it bring 
D 


34 THE TRUE IMPERIALISM 


forth and bud; so...” The inevitableness of 
the national ministry shall be leagued with the 
inevitableness of the budding and beautifying 
spring. The purified people shall discharge the 
mission of spring-maker among the peoples of 
the world. Its goings and its comings shall not 
be creative of destruction and distress. It shall 
be the creator of gladness and music and song. 
“The mountains and the hills shall break forth 
into singing, and all the trees of the field shall 
clap their hands.” “Instead of the thorn shall 
come up the fir tree”; “the thorn”—with its 
sharp, piercing, pain-giving spikes; the “fir tree” 
—from which were made the musical instruments, 
and especially the framework of the harp; 
“instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree” ; 
the glorified people shall move among the scattered 
peoples, and shall exercise the beautiful ministry 
of changing the creators of pain into the makers 
of melody and praise. “Instead of the brier,” 
with its bitter, poisonous sting, “shall come up the 
myrtle tree,” with its glossy leaves, and white 
flowers, and grateful perfume. “Instead of the 
brier the myrtle tree!” The redeemed and con- 
secrated nation shall exult in a missionary enter- 
prise which shall change the poisonous enmities 
and jealousies of the people into the perfume of 


THE TRUE IMPERIALISM 35 


sweet and gracious sentiments, and the chastened 
delights of a brief and blameless life. 

A full life, a true imperialism, a splendid 
magnanirmity, an inevitably beautiful ministry— 
this is to be the heritage of a nation which is 
surrendered to the call of the Highest, and which 
is rooted by the “river of water of life.” It is an 
ambition which we well might covet for our own 
nation, a consummation for which we might all 
devoutly pray. May the good Lord draw our 
people to the springs! May we turn from our 
faintness and weariness to “the river of God’s 
pleasures.” “Ho, every one that thirsteth, come 
ye to the waters!” “Let him that heareth say, 
Come ; let him that is athirst come ; and whoso- 
ever will, let him take of the water of life freely.” 


Ill 


“BEWARE OF THE DOGS” 


*« Beware of the dogs, beware of the evil workers, beware of the 
concision : for we are the circumcision, which worship God in 
the spirit, and rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence 
in the flesh.” —PHILIPPIANS lii. 2, 3. 


“ BEWARE! Beware! Beware! For:”... There 
we have an urgent warning associated with a 
primary truth. On the one hand are things to 
be avoided ; on the other hand are things to be 
pursued. The text enshrines the presentation of 
a contrast—on one side dark, forbidding, and 
revolting ; on the other side radiant and alluring, 
“ Beware of the dogs ; beware of the evil workers ; 
_ beware of the concision.” There is no mincing 
sensitiveness in the apostle’s speech. “ Beware 
of the dogs.” Has the apostle temporarily lost 
his delicate courtesy, and have his heated feelings 
led him into the use of a somewhat coarse and 


“ BEWARE OF THE DOGS” 37 


violent speech? Look at the suggestion of the 
figure. The dog of the Eastern city was a home- 
less outcast, sniffing in accumulated garbage with 
the intent of finding its food. Its home was the 
street. Its food was the refuse. Now, that is how 
the Jew thought about the Gentile. He was a 
dog. He had no home privilege in God. He 
was an outcast. He was a tenant of the streets, 
and he fed upon the crumbs which were thrown 
out from the more favoured nation’s table. The 
Jew was the home-child; the Gentile was the 
creature of the gutter! That is how “the 
circumcised” felt and thought and spoke about 
“the uncircumcised,” and they carried their con- 
ceptions even into the domain of the Christian 
Church. The circumcised Christian conceived 
himself as being in the home of the Lord, and he 
regarded the uncircumcised as being in the streets. 
And now Paul takes up the figure, and reverses 
the application. “Nay, nay!” cried the apostle, 
“you are living in the outsides of things. You 
are magnifying ceremonies and ordinances and 
institutions. You are dwelling in the external. 
Yes, you are in the streets! You are the dogs. 
You are moving in the narrow channels of the 
senses, when you might abide in the spacious 
home of the spirit. You are picking up the 


38 “BEWARE OF THE DOGS” 


crumbs when you might sit down to the feast. 
You are the dogs. Beware of the dogs!” 

“Beware of the evil workers!” the spies, 
working so subtly, so insidiously, so speciously, 
with the purpose of bringing you into the 
bondage of an external ceremonialism. They 
will promise you home-life, while in reality they 
lead you into street-life; out of the spirit into 
the flesh; transforming you from children of 
liberty and festival into dogs, creatures of 
bondage and restraint. “Beware of the evil 
workers !” 

“Beware of the concision!” There the 
apostle uses more pointed and definite speech. 
“Beware of the concision!” Beware of those 
who imagine that by “concising,” by excising a 
little flesh, they fulfil the conditions which entitle 
them to the plenteous heritage of the Kingdom 
of Grace. Beware of those who imagine that 
by merely curbing the flesh they can become 
heirs to a spiritual kingdom. “ Beware of the 
concision.” 

“Beware of the dogs; beware of the evil 
workers ; beware of the concision.” What is all 
this but a solemn and urgent warning against 
externalism, against all dependence upon outward 
ordinance and form? It is a grave reminder, 


“BEWARE OF THE DOGS” 39 


that it is possible for a professing Christian to be 
an inhabitant of the streets, and to be satisfied 
with the scrappy and precarious living of a dog. 
It is a powerful protest against mere religious 
outwardness by a man who had experienced the 
mighty suctions of its temptations, and who 
knew the compromising inclinations of the human 
heart. Is the protest inopportune in our own 
time? Is it an interesting relic of a submerged 
antiquity? Is this Epistle to the Philippians 
fusty and musty, with the rank smell of a primi- 
tive day, or may we regard it as a contemporary 
document with pertinent applications to our own 
time? Is there any danger that our souls should 
live the vagrant life of the streets, and mistake the 
streets for the home? May we come to regard 
a ceremony as our Fathers house? May we 
through formalism lose our birthright? May the 
flesh receive more emphasis than the spirit? 
These questions are not irrelevant. They belong 
to our own immediate day. There is a peril that 
we may be bewitched into the streets, and lose 
our place at the great feast. Let me put together 
half a dozen words, and let me ask you if their 
order and relationships do not describe a sequence 
which has been the besetting seduction of every age 
—forms, ritualism, sacramentarianism, priestism, 


40 “BEWARE OF THE DOGS” 


a Christ with barriers between Himself and 
His people—the streets! Let us beware of any- 
thing which would put a wall between us and the 
Master of the house. “A certain man made a 
great supper,” and we are entitled to sit down 
with him at the feast. Let no one confine us to 
the streets by the imposition of forms, ceremonies, 
and sacraments. Let us go directly and immedi- 
ately to Him, and let us “ beware of the dogs, and 
of the evil workers, and of the concision,” who 
would bind us down to an externalism which 
would rob us of the nourishment of life’s eternal 
feast. 

Let us now pass to the other part of my text, 
in which the apostle turns from a starved and 
starving externalism to the fruitful inwardness of 
all true religion. What are the marks of true 
religion? Paul enumerates three, and they 
appear to me to be full and all-sufficient. Let 
us glance at them. 

The first characteristic of true religion ts worship. 
—Yes, but what kind of worship? “ Worship in the 
spirit.” Not a ceremonial act, not the curbing of 
the flesh, not the eating of a wafer. These may 
be the signs and symbols of worship; they do not 
constitute the worship itself. Worship is in the 
spirit. It is not the attitude of clasped hands, or 


“BEWARE OF THE DOGS” 4 


reverent prostration of the body ; it is the posture 
of the spirit. “Know ye not that ye are the 
temple?” That is a great word. Mark it. If I 
am a temple, a church, the worshipper is within. 
If this body is a cathedral, what sort of service is 
going on within? Is the Holy Place dark and 
silent, or is service proceeding? I know the kind 
of service which was observed in Paul’s temple. 
We have one or two little glimpses, as through 
an open doorway, into the nature of his daily 
services, Here is an instructive view :—“ We give 
thanks without ceasing.” That is part of the 
worship which proceeded in the apostle’s temple. 
Not only at matins or vespers, but ceaselessly! 
“We give thanks without ceasing.” Inside that 
temple the worshipping spirit told the daily tale 
of the Lord’s mercies, and sent back to the Lord 
a continuous thanksgiving. That is worship in 
the Spirit. Here is another glimpse of the 
apostle’s temple service: —‘“We pray without 
ceasing.” Inside the temple the spirit was always 
on its knees. Always? Yes; when Paul went 
from Mars Hill to tent-making his spirit did not 
alter its posture. It remained upon its knees. 
When Jesus of Nazareth passed from the tempta- 
tion to the marriage in Cana of Galilee, His spirit 
did not change ; the service proceeded, the spirit 


42 “BEWARE OF THE DOGS” 


remained upon its knees. That is the very glory 
of spiritual worship. We can pray without 
ceasing. We can even now be like the angels ; 
we can “serve Him day and night in His temple.” 
When we pass into our places of business, our 
soul can retain its reverence, and even in the 
commonplace we can be possessed by the con- 
sciousness of the presence of God. We can 
hallow all the varied experiences of the common 
day,—our home, our business, our recreations, our 
politics, our economics, our zsthetics— we can 
hallow them all by a spirit that never asserts 
itself in presumption or vulgarity, but which 
remains upon its knees, as ever in the presence of 
the Eternal and Holy God. “Know ye not that 
ye are the temple?” Have, then, a temple 
service where prayer proceeds without ceasing. 
What else went on in the temple of the Apostle 
Paul? If he were a temple, who was the priest ? 
“ He hath made us kings and priests unto God.” 
... Then in his own temple Paul was his own 
priest. Then did the priest offer sacrifices in his 
temple? Yes, the fire was never out upon the 
altar. What did he sacrifice? Himself. “I am 
poured out upon the altar.” He offered himself 
as a ceaseless consecration to his God. These 
are the temple services of the Apostle Paul. “We 


“BEWARE OF THE DOGS” 43 


give thanks without ceasing.” “We pray without 
ceasing.” “I am poured out upon the altar.” 
Thanksgiving! Supplication! Sacrifice! This 
was the temple service that knew no ending, 
This is the nature of true religion. This is 
“worship in the spirit.” This is the deep, secret 
home-life as opposed to the uncertain life of the 
streets. “Know ye not that ye are the temple?” 
Let your soul be a ceaseless worshipper. “We 
worship God in the spirit.” 

The second characteristic of true religion is 
exultation. “We glory,” we rejoice, we boast! 
The Jews of the circumcision, the dogs of 
the street, had their boast and _ exultation. 
In what did they glory? They gloried in 
externals ; they revelled in crumbs. They gloried 
in distinguished lineage and high descent. They 
gloried in the exclusiveness of their own peculiar 
caste. They gloried in their aristocracy of culture, 
and in their isolation from the vulgar herd, whose 
minds were void of the law and its traditions. 
They gloried in their own exclusive covenant, and 
in the sealing bond of circumcision. These were 
the glories, and in them they found their exulta- 
tion. These were the boast of externalism, and 
over against them Paul proclaimed the glory of a 
true and inward religion. “We glory in Christ 


44 “BEWARE OF THE DOGS” 


Jesus.” In Him we find our crown of rejoicing. 
In Him we make our boast. Not in forms; not 
in ordinances ; not in privileged exclusiveness ; 
not in remote descent, and in distinguished suc- 
cession ; we glory, directly and immediately, in 
Christ Jesus our Lord. “ God forbid that I should 
glory save in the cross of our Lord and Saviour 
Jesus Christ.” This is the boast and exultation 
of true spiritual religion. When anything else is 
exalted to the throne of glory, the spaciousness of 
religious life is contracted, and the soul is im- 
prisoned in a carnal bondage. Again I ask, is 
the danger imaginary, and is the warning gratui- 
tous? I do not know that we hear much glorying 
in Abrahamic succession, nor is there any attempt 
to impose that succession as a bondage upon our 
souls. But I think I have heard men glory in 
what they call apostolic succession, which at the 
best is only a ceremonial lineage, and through it 
the attempt is made to bring all men into carnal 
bondage. By whom do we obtain access into 
grace? By the ministry of the last product of 
apostolic succession? Then in apostolic succes- 
sion let us glory. But listen to the Apostle 
Paul ;—“ by whom also we have access by faith 
into this grace wherein we stand.” By whom? 
By Jesus Christ. By faith in Jesus Christ we hawe 


“BEWARE OF THE DOGS” 45 


access into grace. “I am the door.” “By Me if 
any man enter in, he shall be saved.” Then we 
pay homage to no man-appointed doorkeepers. 
We glory in no ceremonial succession. We rejoice 
in the largeness of our spiritual liberty. We glory 
in the free spaciousness of our home-life in Christ, 
and we will pray to be delivered from all minor 
gloryings which may lead us to the precarious 
externalism of the streets. “We glory in Christ 
Jesus.” 

The third mark of true religion is spiritual 
assurance-—“ We have confidence, but not in the 
flesh.” “We have confidence ”—that is one of 
the characteristics for which we must seek in all 
deep and true religious life. But where shall we 
gain our confidence? Where must assurance be 
sought? The apostle answers—“ Not in the 
flesh.” Where, then, can our confidence be found ? 
Back in the Christ! “ We know that our sins are 
forgiven us for His name’s sake.” “We know!” 
Confidence, but not in the flesh. ‘“ We know that 
all things work together for good to them that love 
God.” “Weknow!” Confidence, but not in the 
flesh. “We know, that if our earthly house of this 
tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of 
God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the 
heavens.” “We know!” Confidence, but not in 


46 “BEWARE OF THE DOGS” 


the flesh. Our confidence is born out of our 
fellowship with the Lord. In our spirits we have 
the witness. “God is a Spirit,” and all lasting 
treasure must be sought in the realm of spirit. 
“They that worship Him must worship Him in 
spirit and in truth.” 


IV 


WHAT IS WORLDLINESS? 


“J pray not that Thou shouldest take them out of the world, 
but that Thou shouldest keep them from the evil.”—Jouw 
xvii. 15. 


Not abstraction from the world, but protection 
from the evil! The deliverance is to be effected, 
not by the removal of the body, but by the 
reinforcement of the spirit. Our redemption is 
to be accomplished, not by changing our locality, 
but by changing the conditions of the heart. The 
purpose of our Saviour is to perfect us in holiness, 
not by withdrawing us from all infections, but by 
making us proof against all disease in the endow- 
ment of invincible health. The ideal of aspir- 
ing discipleship is not to be found in innocence, 
with an environment destitute of temptation, 
but in holiness, despite the menacing advances 
of infection and disease. “In the world ye 
shall have tribulation: bat be of good cheer: I 


48 WHAT IS WORLDLINESS? 


have overcome the world.” “I pray not that 
Thou shouldest take them out of the world, 
but that Thou shouldest keep them from the 
evil.” 

Now what is this world, this ever-present 
worldliness, so perilous, so pervading, surging like 
an infected atmosphere round about the disciple’s 
life? We shall never apprehend its significance 
by dwelling merely in the realm of external 
conduct, and classifying acts in the two categories 
of white and black, worldly and unworldly, pious 
and depraved. Worldliness is never to be known 
from the careful memorising of a catalogue of 
things to be avoided, and things to be esteemed. 
Conduct will never be safely and fruitfully guided 
by mere attention to labels, by whomsoever the 
labels have been attached. I must know why 
this act has been labelled worldly, and this other 
unworldly, and what were the conditions which 
prevailed when the classification was made. A 
label may prove grandly effective in checking my 
steps, in arresting my thought, in sending me to 
the Court of Appeal to stand before the tribunal 
of my conscience, in causing me to review my 
conduct by the illuminating principles of the 
Christian faith. So far, a ready-made classifica- 
tion may be morally useful. But we are never 


WHAT IS WORLDLINESS? Ag 


going to learn the meaning of worldliness by 
confining our attention to external acts, by doing 
this and by avoiding that, and guided solely by 
the labels which have been attached by other 
hands. I turn to the labellings, and I find that 
the classification has been prosecuted into most 
scrupulous minuteness. I do not condemn the 
classification. I only assert that we cannot 
wisely and safely begin and end with the enumera- 
tion itself. Dialogues are classified as unworldly. 
Trialogues are getting perilously near the border, 
and the addition of two or more characters 
renders the performance theatrical, and most 
assuredly merits the condemnation of worldly. 
Draughts are catalogued as unworldly ; dominoes 
are in the region of moral twilight, a kind of 
uncertain grey; while cards are indisputably placed 
in the ranks of the worldly. A country-dance 
is innocent and unworldly ; added complications 
change the category and determine its place 
among the worldly. My dear old landlord in 
Edinburgh used to visit his lodgers’ sitting-room 
late on Saturday night, and carefully lock the 
piano and unlock the harmonium. His classifica- 
tion was determined by his sense of Sabbatic 
fitness, and to have permitted the piano to speak 
on the Sabbath would have appeared to him as 
E 


50 WHAT IS WORLDLINESS? 


the opening of the floodgates of a most offensive 
sacrilege. Well, I have mentioned these things, 
not to secure their reprobation. To sneer at 
these devoted souls would be to fling scorn at 
men whose shoes the majority of us are not 
worthy to stoop down and unloose. I have 
mentioned them to support the assertion that we 
are not going to apprehend and wisely appreciate 
the genius of worldliness by the study of the 
mere enumeration of unlawful and permissible 
acts. Why, the appraisement of the moral 
contents of an external act changes with the 
changing times. Our Puritan forefathers regarded 
the eating of a mince-pie as an act of abject 
profanity. I suppose that even fifty or sixty 
years ago it was regarded as a symptom of 
sheer worldliness and of compromise with the 
devil for a minister to wear a coloured tie. I 
am not sure that the judgment is yet altogether 
obsolete, but certainly it does not enjoy the same 
widespread prevalence as in the days of old. 
Classifications vary with the varying days, and 
it is not in the most scrupulous observance of the 
most minute classifications that we escape the 
infection and contagion of the world. It is 
possible to avoid all the things labelled “ worldly,” 
and yet to remain incorrigibly worldly, to be 


WHAT IS WORLDLINESS? 51 


steeped through and through with the spirit of 
this “present evil world.” 

What, then, is the world, against which our 
Master yearns that we should be secured? It is 
a spirit, a temperament, an attitude of soul. It 
is life without high callings, life devoid of lofty 
ideals. It is a gaze always horizontal, never 
vertical. Its motto is “ forward,” never “ upward.” 
Its goal is success, not holiness. Hearing 
no mystic voices, it is destitute of reverence. It 
never bows in rapt and silent wonder in the 
secret place. It experiences no awe-inspiring 
perceptions of a mysterious presence. Its life 
is bounded by the superficies. It stops at the 
veil, and does not perceive it is a veil, the thin, 
gauzy covering of the Eternal. It has lusts, but 
no supplications. It has ambition, but no aspira- 
tion. God is not denied; He is forgotten and 
ignored. Such is the world,—the subtle presence 
of the non-spiritual, earthliness without heavenli- 
ness, life without the conscious possession of an 
over-arching spiritual firmament, and the forces 
that call and move in the infinite. 

Now see the perilous influence of this upon 
the disciples of Christ. The presence of the non- 
spiritual is ubiquitous. It confronts us every- 
where. It is mighty, mighty by reason of its 


~ 


52 WHAT IS WORLDLINESS? 


visible proportions. Worldly people are in the 
majority, and their numerical proportions tend to 
make us timid and afraid. The non-spiritual 
folk, the folk with the merely horizontal vision, 
the worldly folk, are so abounding, that the un- 
worldly, the man whose life has sky and aspira- 
tion and prayer, stands out in bold and almost 
curious relief. The oddity of the spiritual has 
not yet ceased, and he who lives in the heavenly 
places must be prepared to reveal a life full of 
glaring eccentricities when contrasted with the 
life and usages of his day. But that is just what 
makes us afraid. We shrink from being original. 
We don’t like to appear odd. We are reluctant 
to be conspicuous by our contrast to non-spiritual 
men. We should be glad to wear white 
garments if they were worn by everybody, but 
to wear them when the prevalent fashion favours 
quite another colour demands a courage to which 
we are by no means eagerly inclined. And so, 
for fear of oddity, we make a compromise. To 
avoid offence we lower our flag. We check our 
spirits. We strangle our supplications. We shut 
out the infinite. We lose the influence of that 
mystic wind which breathes upon the soul that 
lives confronting the infinite. This confinement 
of vision this harsh delimiting of aspiration, 


WHAT IS WORLDLINESS? 53 


effected by a worldly compromise, brings a 
smothering influence round about the powers of 
the soul. The soul has hitherto breathed in 
infinite supplication ; now it drowses in cribbed 
and cabined temporisings. All the coronal 
faculties begin to lapse into a profound and 
perilous sleep, and the soul becomes the captive 
of this present evil world. 

Is that a fanciful analysis, remote from the 
highway of practical life? Let us put the 
teaching in the shape of a concrete example, 
which shall be taken from common life. Here is 
a man who has gone into business as a disciple 
of Jesus, with lofty hopes and aspirations. He 
discovers that he has underestimated the might 
and influence of the ubiquitous and non-spiritual 
world. He painfully realises the oddity of his 
position. With others, business speeds; with 
him, it only crawls. He begins to experience the 
drawings of an evil gravitation. The emphasis 
of his life is changed. His eyes are allured to 
success more than to holiness. Ambition becomes 
more fervent, and aspiration grows more faint. 
For him the infinite begins to close, and the 
closing of the infinite means the corrosion of 
conscience. “First he called the doings of the 
place dishonest.” The judgment was_ sharp, 


54 WHAT IS WORLDLINESS? 


immediate, and final. “ First he called the doings 
of the place dishonest ; then he called them sharp 
practice; then he called them a little shady ; 
then he said it was rather close sailing; then he 
styled it clever; then he laughed at the success 
of a vile trick; then he touched the pitch, and, 
thinking all the time it was with one finger, he 
was presently besmeared all over.” A man’s 
experience of men is but small if he cannot 
confirm the accuracy of this description. It 
represents an invasion of worldliness, which accom- 
plishes its triumphs by robbing souls of their 
spirituality, shutting up their heavens, turning 
their aspirations into lusts, their prayers into 
carnal ambitions, and confining the total move- 
ment of their lives to the horizontal plane of the 
common earth. 

But, now, is it possible for men to be in the 
world, and to remain undefiled? Jesus of 
Nazareth did it. “Oh yes, but Jesus was a simple 
peasant, living among the sweet simplicities of 
village life, and to the years of manhood ex- 
periencing nothing of the blighting and defiling 
seductions of the more crowded towns and cities.” 
Well, I am not so sure of the accuracy of our 
common description of village life, of its sweet 
and undefiled simplicities. No more terrible and 


WHAT IS WORLDLINESS ? 55 


appalling concentration of nastiness is to be found 
anywhere than in many an English village. But 
be that as it may, Nazareth was not remote from 
the more voluminous currents of the world. 
Just near the village was the highroad “along 
which legions marched, and princes swept with 
their retinues, and all sorts of travellers from all 
countries went to and fro. The scandals of the 
Herods buzzed up and down these roads. The 
customs too of the neighbouring Gentiles,—their 
loose living, their sensuous worship, their absorp- 
tion in business,—all this would furnish endless 
talk in Nazareth, both among men and boys. 
Here Jesus grew up and suffered temptation, 
tempted in all points like as we are, yet without 
sin. The perfection of His purity and patience 
was achieved, not as behind a wide fence, which 
shut the world out, but amid rumour and scandal, 
with every provocation to unlawful curiosity and 
premature ambition.” Yes, Jesus remained un- 
defiled in a world abounding in subtle infection 
and seduction. But not in Syria alone, not only 
in those few strange and mystic years, has the 
radiant achievement been wrought. The Christian 
centuries have been beautified and glorified by 
Christian disciples, who have walked with Him in 
white. In their lives have we seen the strong 


56 WHAT IS WORLDLINESS? 


fulfilment of the word of the olden days ;—* Thou 
shalt not be afraid for the terror by night, nor for 
the arrow that flieth by day, nor for the pesti- 
lence that walketh in darkness, nor for the 
destruction that wasteth at noonday. ... Thou 
shalt tread upon the lion and adder; the young 
lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under 
feet.” What is the spiritual content of that great 
promise, but this—that they who “dwell in the 
secret place of the Most High” shall be proof 
against all things noisome and noxious and 
venomous ; they shall step over and through them 
without being tainted, poisoned, or defiled? “They 
shall take up serpents,” says Christ our Lord— 
“They shall take up serpents; and if they drink 
any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them.” They 
shall be in the world, yet kept from the evil; 
mingling with sinners, yet separate from sinners ; 
and if they are called upon to labour in atmo- 
spheres reeking with moral pestilence, “it shall 
not hurt them.” 

Yes, purity, even in the defiling ways of the 
world, is a grand possibility ; how can we make it 
a glorious achievement? On one point the New 
Testament is perfectly clear, and indeed the 
teaching is enshrined in my text, that the attain- 
ment and retainment of unworldliness is not to be 


WHAT IS WORLDLINESS? 57 


found by means ascetic, but by means athletic, 
not by flight, but by fight, not by indolent retire- 
ment, but by the health of a strong, resolute, and 
aggressive spirit. It was a true inspiration of the 
artist who depicted a monk at his desk in the 
monastery cell, with pen in hand, and eyes look- 
ing upward for illumination, and the Holy Spirit 
descending in the form of a dove to bring the 
light and guidance he sought. That was a true 
inspiration; but it was equally true to depict a 
foul spirit speaking from beneath, seeking to 
engage the monk’s attention, that he might 
whisper in his ear the corrupt and corrupting 
counsel of the world. In convent and in the 
busiest highway the two voices call, and no with- 
drawal of the body will deliver us from the subtle 
and ensnaring influence of the evil world. 

How then is unworldliness to be an actuality, 
a radiant and ever blessed possession? The only 
defence against an ill contagion is exuberant 
health. It is the man who is run down who 
becomes the victim of the pestilence. It is not 
otherwise in the realm of the Spirit. If we are to 
be protected against the pestilence that walketh 
in darkness, we shall have to be possessed by « 
plenitude of spiritual life. How is that defen- 
sive life to be gained? “ This zs hfe... to 


58 WHAT IS WORLDLINESS? 


know Jesus.” To know the Master is to appro- 
priate the Master’s life. “I am come that ye 
might have life, and that ye might have it more 
abundantly.” It is in this abundant life that we 
find the secret of moral security. If life is to rise 
within us like a well, it must be because of our 
intimate fellowship with the Christ. He is “our 
refuge and strength.” Our offensive and defensive 
forces are to be gathered in Him. Familiarity 
with Jesus makes a man invincible against the 
world. “I can do all things through Christ which 
strengtheneth me.” “We are more than con- 
querors in Christ.” 


V 


“UNDER HIS WINGS” 


“ He shall cover thee with His feathers, and under His wings shalt 
thon trust: His truth shall be thy shield and buckler. Thou 
shalt not be afraid for the terror by night, nor for the arrow 
that flieth by day, nor for the pestilence that walketh in 
darkness, nor for the destruction that wasteth at neonday.”— 
PSALMS xci. 4-6. 


“THE terror by night!” “The arrow that flieth 
by day!” “The pestilence that walketh in dark- 
ness!” “The destruction that wasteth at noon- 
day!” What an appalling catalogue of foes! 
They are not peculiar to any one life ; they haunt 
the precincts of all lives. They pervade all the 
changing hours and moods of the varied day. 
Every change in the day’s march reveals a special 
and characteristic foe. If life is passing through 
a season of midnight blackness, it is exposed to 
the antagonism of the “terror by night.” If life 
has emerged from the blackness, and is passing 
out into the sweet and broadening light, it 


60 “UNDER HIS WINGS” 


becomes endangered by “ the arrow that flieth by 
day.” If life is luxuriating under the cloudless, 
glowing sky of a wealthy noontide, it is im- 
perilled by “ the destruction that wasteth at noon- 
day.” If the shadows are gathering round again, 
and the light is fading from the sky, and life ex- 
periences the chill of the looming night, it may 
become the victim of “ the pestilence that walketh 
in darkness.” In one or other of these changing 
seasons we may probably all be found. There is 
an enemy about us in the noontide, and another 
in the midnight, and other foes inhabit the 
twilights of evening and dawn. Let us look 
a little while at these insidious enemies which 
beset the child of God. 

“ The terror by night.—There are many things 
which become terrific and terrifying through the 
medium of the night. In the night-time faint 
sounds become laden with alarming significance. 
The creaking of the furniture in the room is 
almost suggestive of the opening of coffins. The 
stirring of the window by the moving night-air is 
suggestive of unfriendly approach. The scratch- 
ing of a mouse at the wainscot becomes fraught with 
all manner of hostile invasion. As it is with the 
hearing, so is it with the sight. Vague outlines 
are filled out into portentous completeness. A 


“UNDER HIS WINGS” 61 


bramble-bush represents itself as a crouching foe. 
A patch of snow in the corner of the field images 
itself as a sheeted ghost. “Things are not what 
they seem.” In the night we are the victims of 
exaggeration, The commonplace becomes aggra- 
vated. The molehill becomes a mountain. Is 
not this equally true of the life of the Spirit? 
How everything rears itself into calamitous pro- 
How the petty 


portions when we are “down”! 


obstacles become enlarged and multiplied! We 
see things out of their proportions. We lose the 
calmness and clearness of our discernment. This 
is assuredly part of the enemy’s forces, who is 
known as “the terror by night.” 

“The arrow that fueth by day.”—The night is 
past; the sweet fresh daylight is spread over 
the life; the terror born of exaggeration is for- 
gotten. Is there no other foe? Enemies may be 
begotten of sunbeams as well as of darkness, 
The rays of light may become the arrows of 
death. How often it happens when men come 
into the clear happy light of favour, some better 
part of their being is slain! I wonder how many 
Sunday School teachers there are in the land 
with incomes of over 41000 a year! It is a 
most significant question. How is it that our 
Sunday Schools are staffed with comparatively 


62 “UNDER HIS WINGS” 


poor men and women? You hear it said of 
one man, “Oh, he has lost interest in that 
now.” Lost? That sounds like something slain. 
He has been pierced by “the arrow that flieth 
by day,” and some holy sympathy has been 
destroyed. Or an arrow has transfixed his 
geniality, his spirit of good-fellowship, and the 
winsome thing lies dead. He may have been 
saved from the “terror by night”; he has 
become the victim of the “arrow that flieth by 
day.” 

“ The destruction that wasteth at noonday.”— 
This only marks the emphasis of the dangers 
of the brightening day. It proclaims the perils 
of the cloudless noon. A frosty night can 
harden the land, and make it impervious to the 
ministry of the farmer, but the fierce sunshine 
can attain the same end. Winter can freeze the 
land until it is as hard as iron; a succession 
of June noontides can bake it quite as hard. 
Adversity can dry up a man’s sympathies; pro- 
sperity can induce as severe a drought. When 
a man’s life passes into the full blaze of a fierce 
prosperity, the bloom and beauty of his spirit 
may be easily wasted and destroyed. His leaf 
may wither. His reverence may be destroyed. 
His aspirations may be dried up. Pride may 


“UNDER HIS WINGS” 63 


supplant the grace of lowliness, and cocksure- 
ness may jostle out the spirit of “a quiet walk 
with God.” 

“The pestilence that walketh in darkness.’— 
When the brightness of the afternoon begins to 
grow dim in the shadows of coming night, and 
a chill air touches the happy and comfortable 
spirit, there is great danger of the life becom- 
ing possessed by “the pestilence that walketh 
in darkness.” It is not easy to keep a room 
sweet which is deprived of the sunlight. Fusti- 
ness begins to reign where the light is not a 
guest. We need the help of the Almighty to 
keep the life sweet when the sunshine is tem- 
porarily withdrawn. Everybody knows the ill 
plagues that stir about us when life comes into 
the shadows. There is the pestilence of fret- 
fulness, and melancholy, and murmuring, and 
despair. The heart is sorely prone to open its 
gates to these types of pestilence when it first 
encounters the chilly shadows of an unexpected 
night. 

Now let us turn away from the foes, and 
contemplate our resources. We have looked at 
the enemies ; now let us look at our all-sufficient 
Friend. 

“He shall cover thee with His feathers.” — Against 


64 “UNDER HIS WINGS” 


all possible types of enemies we may enjoy the 
protection of the great Mother-Bird, God. “He 
shall cover thee.” The protection is to be per- 
fectly complete. The wings would enfold us so 
that there is no possible opening for the dangerous 
approach of a foe. What may we not hope to 
gain in such a gracious refuge? We may expect 
to find healing. “The Sun of Righteousness shall 
arise with healing in His wings.” If we have 
been wounded by the arrow, or affrighted by the 
terrors of the night, we shall be healed and com- 
forted under the shadow of the Almighty. The 
troubled, frightened child, who has been startled 
in the darkness of the night, is hugged to its 
mother’s breast, and speedily the panting, agitated 
little heart is comforted into rest again. And if 
we have been seeing things, and hearing things, 
out of their true shapes and proportions, the 
comforting breast of our God will restore us to 
quietness again. “ Let not your heart be troubled.” 
Let it not be agitated and alarmed. “Come 
unto Me, and I will give you rest.” And if we 
may gain healing, we shall also surely gain 
security. nan old Puritan writer I have found 
the phrase, “ Under His wings we have curing 
and securing.” The quaint expression serves mp 
purpose to-night. Under the wings of ths 


“UNDER HIS WINGS” 65 


Almighty our wounds are healed, and our alarms 
are stilled, and a joyful confidence pervades the 
soul. We may be in the night, but no terror 
will disturb us. We may be in the broadening 
light, but no arrow will wound us. We may be 
in the noontide, but no glare will consume us. 
We may be in the shadows, but no pestilence 
will corrupt us. “Under His wings will I take 
refuge.” 

“ H1s truth shall be thy shield and buckler.’——_The 
Psalmist is employing a variety of figures that 
he may make clear to us the amplitude of the 
protecting grace of God. He is not contented 
with the wealthy figure of the Mother-Bird ; he 
adds another—“ Thy shield.” And then, as if 
both figures were not sufficiently emphatic and 
effective, he adds a third—‘“ Thy buckler.” The 
shield may appear to be only a partial defence, 
but the buckler is an all-surrounding coat of mail, 
covering the person on every side. There is no 
part left exposed to the enemy’s attack. Before 
and behind, on the right hand and on the left, I 
am beset by the protective power of God. To 
what does the Psalmist attribute this mighty 
defence? “His truth.” “His truth shall be thy 
Shield and Buckler.” Perhaps we may express 
the pith of the Psalmist’s meaning by using in 

F 


66 “UNDER HIS WINGS” 


place of the word “truth” the more personal 
word “ truthfulness,” or “ trustworthiness.” Mark, 
then, this: it is not our feelings which are to be 
our defence. Our feelings may be as changeable 
as a barometer, and building upon them we have 
no fixed, dependable resource. If I am to judge 
the defences of my religious life by the state and 
quality of my feelings, then I can clearly see that 
there are breaches in the wall every day, through 
which the evil one may make his attack. I turn 
from my feelings to the truthfulness of God. At 
once I pass from loose stones to compact rock. 
His truthfulness, the sure word of His promise, 
is to be my strong defence. “Hath He not 
said, and shall He not do it?” What hath He 
said about thy past? “Shall He not do 
it?” What hath He said about thy present? 
“Shall He not do it?” What hath He said 


concerning thy to-morrow? “Shall He not 
do it?” “His truth shall be thy shield and 
buckler.” 


“Thou shalt not be afraid.’—Hiding beneath 
His wings, and depending upon the sure word of 
His promise, “thou shalt not be afraid.” Thy 
life shall be possessed by a fruitful quietness. 
Thou shalt reap “the harvest of a quiet eye.” 
Every changing mood of the varied day shall 


“UNDER HIS WINGS” 67 


bring thee good and not ill. The night-time shall 
bring its treasure. The morning shall be the 
minister of gracious dews. The noonday shall 
deposit its glory, “and at evening time it shall 
be light.” 


VI 


THE POWER OF THE CROSS 


“For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom : 
but we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling- 
block, and unto the Greeks foolishness ; but unto them which 
are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, 
and the wisdom of God.”—1 Cor. i. 22. 


“THE Jews ask for signs,” a request which is not 
necessarily indicative of a thirst; it may be an 
asking behind which there is no parched and 
aching spirit. That is the bane and peril of all 
externalism. It may gratify a feverish curiosity 
without awakening the energies of a holy life. 
The Jews asked for signs. “Now, when Herod 
saw Jesus he was exceedingly glad,” for he hoped 
to see a sign. It was a restless curiosity, itching 
for the sensation of some novel entertainment ; it 
was not the pang of a faint and weary heart 
hungering for bread. “He answered him nothing.” 
“The Jews ask for signs,” a request which is 
frequently indicative of a life of moral alienation. 


THE POWER OF THE CROSS 69 


Externalism abounds in moral opiates, and in 
externalisms men often discover drugs by which 
they benumb the painful sense of their own ex- 
cesses. “A wicked and an adulterous generation 
seeketh after a sign.” Men try to resolve into 
merely physical sensations and sensationalisms 
what can only be apprehended by the delicate, 
tender tendrils of a penitent and aspiring soul. 
“And the Greeks seek after wisdom.”—They 
are the epicures in philosophies, the dainty tasters 
of intellectual subtleties; they are the experts 
who relish speculative cleverness, whose mouths 
water at the airiest abstractions, and who recoil 
from the severely practical in stern disgust and 
contempt. “The Jews ask for signs,” and their 
religion degenerates into a despiritualised system 
of magic. “The Greeks seek after wisdom,” and 
their religion becomes the domain of the dis- 
ciplinist theorist, the heritage of a cultured and 
exclusive aristocracy. “But we preach Christ 
crucified,” proclaiming what appears to be His 
shame, glorying in what appears to be the hour 
of His collapse, emphasising the season of His 
appalling darkness, obtruding the bloody, un- 
adorned, and undecked Cross on which He suffered 
His apparent defeat. “We preach Christ 
crucified”"—-we do not whisper it; “we preach 


7° THE POWER OF THE CROSS 


Christ crucified "—we do not whisper it in secret 
coteries ; we do not timidly submit it for subdued 
discussion in the academic grove ; we do not 
offer it to the hands of exclusive circles—we 
preach it, we stand out like the town-crier in 
the public way, and we proclaim it to the common 
and indiscriminate crowd. “The Jews ask for 
signs ; we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a 
stumbling- block.” They cannot get over it; it 
obtrudes itself like a barrier right athwart the 
common track of their common thought; it 
throws all their reckonings into confusion; it 
confronts their hunger for a novel entertainment 
by an apparent stone. Christ crucified! A sign! 
It is significant of nothing but shame, failure, 
utter and dishonourable defeat. “The Greeks 
seek after wisdom; we preach Christ crucified, 
unto the Greeks fooltshness.” It offended their 
mental pride, it confronted their speculative 
ingenuity as a piece of unmitigated absurdity, 
and they repelled it, repelled it because it did 
not approach and conciliate their interest in the 
graceful robes of an alluring philosophy. To the 
Jews a stumbling-block, to the Greeks an ab- 
surdity ; but “to them that are called,” to them who 
offer it the hospitality of mind and heart, to them 
who reverently entertain it on the plea of its own 


THE POWER OF THE CROSS 71 


august claims, to them who render it the willing 
homage and obedience of the will, “to them that 
are called, doth Jews and Greeks,’ irrespective of 
nationality or race, “ Christ, the power of God, a 
mighty dynamic which is the pledge of all moral, 
spiritual triumph, “ azd the wzsdom of God,” an illu- 
mination in which the reverent soul is led into the 
secret hallowed precincts of the very Light of Life. 
“We preach Christ crucified,” says Paul, and 
we are not going to be diverted by the hunger for 
mere sensation; “we preach Christ crucified,” 
and we are not going to be disengaged from our 
high calling, and tempted to submit our Gospel 
as a piece of subtle and mincing controversy. 
We preach it boldly, definitely—‘“ Christ, and 
Him crucified.” It was the only message for the 
apostolic day ; it is the only Gospel for our own. 
1. I want to lead your thoughts round about 
this great text, and to ask you to consider with 
me why it is that the Gospel of Christ and Him 
crucified is the only redeeming message for our 
own day. We preach Christ crucified, because tt is 
the doctrine which incomparably preserves for us 
the sense of the Holiness of God. Now, is that 
altogether an irrelevant and particularly inoppor- 
tune word to apply to our own day? I think 
that the sense of the holiness of God is an element 


72 THE POWER OF THE CROSS 


that is conspicuously lacking in our modern 
religious life. One misses it in our prayers ; it is 
by no means pronounced in our latest hymns; its 
presence is not indicated by any pronounced signs 
in our life. Our ears do not seem to be as open 
to the cry of the seraphim, “ Holy, holy, holy is 
the Lord of Hosts.” I turn to the Old Testament, 
and I find men lying prostrate in the dust, while 
they cry in most fruitful wonder, “Holy, holy, 
holy.” I turn to the Apocalypse, to those mystic 
glimpses of life in the unseen; and wherever I 
turn, my eyes are smitten with the oft-repeated 
cry, “Holy, holy, holy.” “They have no rest,” 
says John,—“ They have no rest day nor night, 
saying, Holy, holy, holy.” I take up great works 
of devotion, great manuals and helpmeets of 
devotion, and I find that every devotional exercise 
is prefaced by an attempt to realise the awful 
holiness of God. Take down from your shelves 
Lancelot Andrewes’ great Book of Private Devo- 
tion, a book to which I personally and privately 
owe much more than I can ever tell you—take 
down Lancelot Andrewes’ Book of Private 
Devotion. How does each day’s exercise begin ? 
In what he calls meditation and adoration. Why, 
the very words have an old-world flavour about 
them as though they belonged to a long past 


THE POWER OF THE CROSS 73 


and obsolete day. Meditation, adoration! And 
Lancelot Andrewes leads us in this meditation 
and adoration right up to the great White Throne, 
into the awful stillness of the holy place, and in- 
stinctively you feel you must take the shoes from 
off your feet, that you must silence every loud 
trampling frivolity and flippancy, that the very 
stillness may steep its message into your awakened 
and wondering spirit. And then Lancelot 
Andrewes leads from adoration and meditation to 
confession, and I do not wonder that such medita- 
tions are followed by such confessions, and such 
contemplations by such agonising cries, such 
visions by such tears. But, brethren, that is a 
very silent note in our day. This never-silent 
emphasis in Scripture, and this essential preface 
to all great books of devotion, are not to be found 
in very pronounced emphasis in our modern 
religious life. I do not think that the cry rings 
through our ears to-day as it did through the ears 
of the saints of old—* Holy, holy, holy, Lord God 
Almighty.” The God whom we commonly 
conceive is lax, loose, kindly, easy-going, and 
good-natured; a God with whom we dare to 
trifle, a God with whom we dare to take liberties 
without being afraid of the consuming flame—an 
easy-going God. Why should I fear? God is 


14 THE POWER OF THE CROSS 


love. Why should I take the shoes from off my 
feet? And so, my brethren, there are a number 
of words that have become almost obsolete; they 
are quite dropping out of our religious vocabulary — 
awe, fear, trembling, and reverence. I do not think 
we particularly like hymns of this kind to-day: 


Lo! God is here, let us adore, 
And own how dreadful is this place. 


We may not like the words, we may be very 
happy that they have become obsolete, but the great 
realities which the words portray will have to be 
restored to our religious thought. The conception 
of the holiness of God must not be relegated to 
primitive times as though it belonged to the 
merely immature thinkings of the old dispensa- 
tion: it is an equally cardinal revelation of the 
new. The idea of Fatherhood does not exclude 
or obscure the idea of holiness; it includes and 
intensifies it. Our Master Himself, in a word 
which I think is far more pregnant than we are 
inclined to suppose—our Master Himself took 
the two words, and sought, for our infinite advan- 
tage, to reveal their eternal wedlock when he cried 
“Holy Father.” It is the first of the two words I 
want to have re-enthroned—‘ Holy Father.” If 
_ I want to gaze upon the holiness of God I know 


THE POWER OF THE CROSS 75 


no place like the Cross; nowhere else do I see— 
speaking now not as a preacher, speaking now as 
a disciple—nowhere else do I see, as I see at the 
Cross, the wondrous purity of the great White 
Throne ; nowhere do I more find such fruitful 
stillness as when I am near the Cross ; nowhere do 
I feel so inclined to take the shoes from off my 
feet. And how do you account for it? I stood 
in a Roman Catholic chapel a day or two ago, 
in the Oratory in Birmingham, where Cardinal 
Newman finished his days ; and I stood just under 
the figure of the crucified Christ. I do not 
know that it helped me better to realise my 
Master’s love for me, but I noticed that the 
steps which formed the pediment were worn with 
the knees of praying folk. I wonder how it is we 
are so still when we get near the Cross! May it 
not be because we are instinctively sensitive that 
we are very near the great White Throne,—and 
that there, in the supreme revelation of sacrifice, 
we have a supreme revelation of the Eternal 
holiness? My brethren, I plead that we may get 
that note back into our religious life. We are 
never going to have grand trees of righteousness 
until they are rooted in a rich soil of reverence, 
and we are never, I think, going to get the 
requisite reverence until we find time to contem- 


76 THE POWER OF THE CROSS 


plate God’s holiness ; and I do not know any place 
that will lead us to such a fruitful contemplation 
of God’s holiness as when we take our place 
near the Cross. “We preach Christ crucified,” 
because the preaching of the doctrine helps us 
create and preserve a sense of the Holiness of 
our God. 

2. We preach Christ crucified, because tt is the 
doctrine which incomparably creates and preserves 
the sense of the nature of Sin—Any doctrine 
which unveils the holiness of God reveals also the 
horribleness of sin; any doctrine which obscures 
God’s holiness veneers man’s sin. If God were 
merely the easy-going, good-natured, lax, and 
kindly Deity of many modern worshippers, sin 
would remain for ever essentially unrevealed, 
God the lax, the kindly, good-natured, easy-going, 
would just bend over His rebellious children and 
say, “My children, I forgive you.” Well, my 
brethren, that might make us easy; it would 
never make us good. Forgiveness is counterfeit 
which decorates the sin it forgives. Such forgive- 
_ness only paves the way for a repetition of the 
offence. All true forgiveness throws a most lurid 
illumination on the sin that is forgiven. That is 
true in purely human relations. A father’s for- 
civeness is criminal if it benumbs the consciousness 


THE POWER OF THE CROSS 77 


of the crime. If, when I forgive my child, my 
forgiveness diminishes his sense of sin, then I 
become a participant in the sin I forgive. That 
is the thoughtless, easy-going, good - natured 
goodness of the world to which our Master 
solemnly refers when He says, “If any man love 
child more than Me, he cannot be My disciple.” 
If any man love his child in such a way as to 
make his child more Christless, if he love his 
child in such a way as to gloss over his young 
one’s sin, then I say his very tenderness and his 
very forgiveness will appear hateful in the sight 
of God, for his tenderness and his forgiveness have 
made sin appear to be less hateful and less re- 
volting, and he can have none of the spirit of the 
Master and be none of His. In the light of all 
true forgiveness sin is revealed to be as black as 
the nether hell. Where, then, shall I see the 
horrors of sin? Where forgiveness is most truly 
revealed. Where shall I see sin most keenly? 
Where forgiveness is supremely revealed. In the 
place of forgiveness I shall see the unutterable 
horrors of sin. Well, then, I turn to the Sermon 
on the Mount. I find no awakening there. I 
find great principles, lofty ideals, severe standards, 
great moral maxims. I bask in the soft sunny 
inspiration of great encouragements; I tremble 


78 THE POWER OF THE CROSS 


amid the lightning flashes of appalling warnings ; 
my incompletenesses yawn before me; all my 
defects are ragged and jagged in the burning 
noon, but I do not feel ashamed of the pain and 
the horribleness and the fearfulness of sin. It is 
not otherwise when I turn even to the story of the 
Prodigal Son. I may be melted into tears, and 
yet my tears may not help my vision. Many a 
man has been made homesick by the story of the 
Prodigal who has nevertheless not been made sick 
of his sin. What I want is something that will not 
merely make me homesick, but something that will 
reveal to me the hatefulness of sin, the leprous dis- 
gustingness of sin, that I may not only turn away 
home, but recoil from sin in contempt asa healthy 
man turns from diseased and disgusting food. 
That is what I want. And I do not see or fear 
my sin in the Sermon on the Mount. Nor do I 
fear and find it in the story of the Prodigal Son. 
But when I stand at the Cross; when I lift my 
eyes to the crucified Son of God; when I recall 
the word that He spoke, “God so loved the world 
that He gave His Son,’—in the love that blazes 
in that death I can see something of the sin for 
which He died. I see it, as I see it nowhere else. 
When I stand at the Cross I am permitted in my 
measure to see sin through the eyes of my God. 


THE POWER OF THE CROSS 79 


The Cross is the place of great awakening for 
sinners, And explain it as we may, or leave it 
unexplained, the experience of the Christian 
Church has gathered abundant witness to the 
truth of this statement. It is in the place where 
forgiveness is most supremely revealed that men 
have gained the most searching convictions of 
their sin. It has been always at the preaching of 
the Cross that men have been pricked—we have 
not a better word yet—-that men have been 
pricked in their heart. Just look at the old 
apostolic word. They were, says the Acts of the 
Apostles, “ pricked in their heart,” pricked, goaded, 
irritated ; first made irritable, and filled with 
unrest, until it touched the heart and became a 
pain and an agony. Nowhere else, nohow else, 
can you get the pain and the shame and the fear 
of sin which you find awakened at the Cross. 
And if we men and women of this latter day wish 
to gaze into the awfulness of Sin, we shall have to 
take our stand at the mystic confluence of mid- 
night and noonday and abide in the Cross of our 
Lord Jesus Christ. “In Thy light shall we see 
light,” and part of the illumination will be the 
veritable horror of Sin. 

3. We preach Christ crucified, because tt is a 
doctrine in the experience of which we incomparably 


80 THE POWER OF THE CROSS 


discern the realities of Grace-—The Cross is not 
merely the birthplace of my fears, or the birthplace 
of my shames, or the birthplace of my disgusts ; it 
is the birthplace of the radiant and immortal hope. 
I like old John Nelson’s words when he was preach- 
ing about the influence of John Wesley’s preach- 
ing and its effect upon him. When he had done, 
he said, “ This man can tell the secrets of my heart, 
but he hath not left me there, he hath showed me 
the remedy, even the blood of Christ. Then was 
my soul filled with consolation, through hope that 
God, for Christ’s sake, would save me.” But that 
has not been merely the experience of John 
Nelson : it has been the experience wherever Christ, 
and Him crucified, has been proclaimed. Where has 
the sanctified comfort of the Christian Church been 
found? Not far away from the Cross! “And I 
saw in my dream that just as Christian came up to 
the Cross his burden loosed from off his shoulders 
and fell from off his back, and began to tumble, 
and so continued to do until it came to the 
mouth of the sepulchre, where it fell in, and I 
saw it no more. Then was Christian glad and 
lightsome, and said with a moving heart, ‘He 
has given me rest by His sorrow and life by 
His death!’” But I will turn away from John 
Bunyan, who might be thought to be a very 


THE POWER OF THE CROSS 8x 


partial witness to the power of his Lord, and I 
will turn to a little frequented path, to Goethe, 
perhaps to Goethe’s masterpiece. Let me give 
you just a short extract from those wonderful 
words in the Confessions of a Beautiful Soul :— 
“IT leaned on a little table beside me and 
I hid my tear-stained face in my hands, and 
who could ever express even in the dimmest way 
the experience that came to me then? A secret 
influence drew my soul to the Cross where Jesus 
once expired. It was an inward leaning—I can- 
not give it any other name—an inward leaning 
like that which draws the heart to its beloved 
in its absence. As my soul drew near to Him 
who became mine and died upon the Cross, in 
that moment I knew what Faith meant, and in 
that moment my spirit received a wholly new 
power of uplifting.” Worthy perhaps to stand 
side by side with the testimony of John Bunyan ! 
But one need not go to literature for one’s 
instances to prove that it is just at the Cross 
men lose their burden and find the truth of the 
realities of grace. A very dear and intimate 
friend of mine only this last week related to me 
a dream which had been blessed by God to the 
redemption of his own father. The father dreamed 


that he was a hare, and a hare he was. So real 
G 


82 THE POWER OF THE CROSS 


and so graphic was the consciousness of the 
dream, that he felt he could almost smell the 
dewy turnip-tops of the fields amongst which he 
moved. Suddenly he heard the cry of the hounds. 
He pricked his ears, listened, and bolted full pace 
across the fields. The hounds drew nearer and 
nearer, and came at last so close to him that he 
could feel their hot breath. Then he found that 
he was leaving the green pastures and was reach- 
ing bare and rugged heights; and just when he 
had reached those bare and rocky heights he 
became conscious that his pursuers were not 
hounds. They were his sins, and he was a flying 
soul! Away up, away up, away up towards the 
summit he saw a cave, and terrified beyond 
measure he made for the cave and then turned 
round. The entrance to the cave was flooded 
with a most unearthly light, and just in the centre 
of the opening there shone resplendently a cross, 
standing between him and the awful things that 
pursued. He awoke, and behold, it was a dream. 
But by the power of the dream he was redeemed. 


Rock of Ages, cleft for me, 
Let me hide myself in Thee. 


4. We preach Christ crucified, because tt 1s the 
doctrine in whose heart we find ample resources for 


THE POWER OF THE CROSS 83 


the attainment of moral and spiritual health—lt is 
not merely a kindly friend who comes and gives me 
the gratification of a pleasant and fleeting sentiment. 
The doctrine of Christ, and Him crucified, is genera- 
tive of moral and spiritual force. It is the doctrine 
above all others, so far as my experience in the 
ministry can tell, which is productive of the ethical 
energy required for the arduous living of our daily 
life. It is the power of God unto salvation. I think 
I can almost feel the thrill of the apostle’s heart 
when he said it—The Gospel of God is “ the power 
of God uxZo salvation,” right up to it, not merely to 
regeneration, but to sanctification and perfect health. 
It is the power of God until God Himself shall 
put His hand upon me and say, Saved! It is the 
dynamical power of God, enabling me to meet my 
- daily foes, to front them in confidence, to overcome 
them, not faintingly, but to be more than a conqueror, 
to march over them as a man in Christ my God. 
So I say that for ethical revivals we must first 
of all have evangelical revivals. We must first 
of all have the doctrine of the Cross before we 
can hope for moral elevation. I wonder how 
many of my audience have read David Brainerd’s 
Journal of his Life and Doings amongst the North 
American Indians? If my young brethren in the 
ministry would take a word from me they would 


84 THE POWER OF THE CROSS 


buy that book, and have it by the bedside. Next 
to John Wesley’s Journal it is the book in which 
I find most devotional help. Get David Brainerd’s 
Life and Journal, edited by Jonathan Edwards, 
and turn to the end of that /ournal, where you 
will find an essay by David Brainerd on the 
doctrine he preached among the Indians, where 
he makes a statement which is full of heartening 
to myself in my own ministry. He says, “I never 
got away from Jesus, and Him crucified, and I found 
that when my people were gripped by this great 
evangelical doctrine of Christ, and Him crucified, 
I had no need to give them instructions about 
morality. I found that one followed as the sure 
and inevitable fruit of the other.” That is a 
wonderful word to come from a saintly man like 
David Brainerd, who hated sin as he feared hell ! 
He said, “I find my Indians begin to put on the 
garments of holiness, and their common life begins 
to be sanctified even in a trifle when they are 
possessed by the doctrine of Christ, and Him 
crucified.” When I look round among my people, 
and look round in my nation, and long for an 
ethical revival for the reformation of outward 
manners and life, I know that the power in which 
it is to be accomplished is the preaching of Christ, 
and Him crucified. Christ, and Him crucified, is 


THE POWER OF THE CROSS 85 


the doctrine which is to be creative of the moral 
reformation of our country. 

And, lastly, how is a great Gospel like this 
to be preached? If it is the doctrine in which I 
best discern the Holiness of God, if it is the 
doctrine in which I discover the horribleness of 
Sin, if it is the doctrine which reveals to me the 
realities of Grace, if it is the doctrine in which I 
find the resources of Ethical Revival—How shall 
I preach it? There is only one way. A Gospel 
of infinite compassion must be preached in the 
spirit of compassion in which it was born. My 
brethren in the ministry, we need to pray, and to 
pray long and to pray fervently, that we may never 
become hard. I think if there is one thing 
we need more than another it is the grace of 
compassion. We want to have a spirit of com- 
passion until we almost instinctively perceive the 
poignant need of those to whom we seek to 
minister. I have gone more than once in my 
ministry in Newcastle and got as near as I could 
to the place on which John Wesley stood when 
he preached his first sermon among the Northum- 
brians. I daresay you remember that part of 
his Journal where he says that he thinks he had 
never noticed such wickedness as he encountered 
in Newcastle-on- Tyne, such blasphemy, such 


86 THE POWER OF THE CROSS 


cursing, such swearing even from the mouths of 
little children. I always read the Journal there 
with great and tender interest, because I wondered 
how John Wesley would think and feel in face 
of such a horrible state of things. You know he 
just adds in his Journal, “ Surely this place is ripe 
for the Master.” I do not think you will be 
surprised to learn that preaching to those undone 
and diseased folk of Northumbria he took one 
of the tenderest texts he could find, and preached 
on “ He was wounded for our transgressions ; He 
was bruised for our iniquities.” And then he tells 
us in the very next paragraph that when he had 
done, the people just clung to his clothes and to 
his hands. He had brought them to the Master 
and to the Cross. It is the same power to-day. 
Our God is willing to be powerful, willing to 
manifest an energy which shall compel men to 
stand, to wonder, and to pray, not only here but 
in all lands. It is the power of God unto salva- 
tion. If we are to retain, or even to gain, this 
spirit of compassion, we ourselves must live very 
near the Cross; and abiding by the Cross, it is 
possible for us to be bathed in the compassions 
that fail not ; and with the message upon our lips 
of Christ, and Him crucified, we shall gather many 
souls unto God. 


VII 


REST FOR WEARY FEET 
**T will give you rest.”,—-MATTHEW xi. 28. 


ONE of the youngest of our poets, and in many ways 
perhaps the most brilliant of them, Mr. William 
Watson, has given us some beautiful verses which 
were born in his soul as he stood by Wordsworth’s 
grave. He asks himself what it is in Wordsworth 
which makes him the sought companion of mul- 
titudes, and which has given the poet a place 
among the immortals. He compares him with 
many others of our poets, and finds that the 
excellent glories in which they shone he con- 
spicuously lacks. He has none of “ Milton’s keen 
translucent music,” none of “ Shakespeare’s cloud- 
less, boundless human view.” He has none of 
“Byron’s tempest anger, tempest mirth.” He 
lacks “the wizard twilight Coleridge knew,” and 
“Shelley’s flush of rose on peaks divine.” In 
all these great poetic treasures, which his peers 


88 REST FOR WEARY FEET 


possess, Wordsworth is wanting. What endow- 
ment then had he, of his own, which could make 
amends for all this lack? Our poet answers, “ He 
had, for weary feet, the gift of rest.” That is 
Wordsworth’s wealth—“ for weary feet, the gift of 
rest.” His poetry takes the heart, and just bathes 
and steeps it in an atmosphere of deep quietness 
and peace. He takes us away from the strife of 
tongues, and from the hard and jarring noise of 
city life, away to that quiet land of lakes, on to 
those still uplands, whose only sounds are the cry 
of the peewit and the bleating of a wandering 
sheep. And as you read the poetry, and feed 
upon its spirit, the stillness of the moorland and 
the mountain tarn enters in and pervades your 
soul, and you enjoy a sense of most refreshing 
peace. He has “for weary feet, the gift of rest.” 
Ay, but put down your Wordsworth, and you 
are back again in the old city. You awake to 
the hard reality and noise of things, and the still 
atmosphere of the poem has gone like the fabric 
of a dream. The old world is as clamorous as 
ever. Its ways are as rough and stony as 
ever. Its rude and thoughtless jostlings are as 
painful and as breathless as ever. Your feet are 
soon again weary, and your heart is tired and sore, 
The poet’s gift of rest is beautiful and not to be 


REST FOR WEARY FEET 89 


despised. It provides a short holiday for the soul, 
but only a holiday, a temporary respite, from 
which it must return to the old monotonous 
beaten ways, and soon find itself wearied with the 
old strife, the old care, the old sin. But the soul 
craves, not merely for a holiday, a temporary tent- 
life on some poetic hill, but for “a rest that 
remaineth ”—to use the apostolic word—“a rest 
that remaineth,” remaineth even when we are in 
the midst of strife and trouble and death. That 
is the rest for which the weary heart craves, and 
which no poet has it in his power to give. His 
gift of rest is a holiday ; we want the rest of the 
Eternal, the changeless rest. 

But there is Another who claims to have for 
weary feet the gift ot rest. The world is always 
full of weary feet, and the days of the Nazarene 
were no exception. The souls that gathered 
about Him numbered a great many weary ones, 
tired, self- nauseated, faint. He looked upon 
them, and saw their weariness, and was moved 
with infinite pity, and thus appealed to them: 
“Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy 
laden, and I will give you rest.” “TI will give.” 
How? You remember that other great word He 
spake on another day: “Not as the world giveth, 
give I.” How does the world give? If the world 


go REST FOR WEARY FEET 


wished to help a heavy-laden man, it would seek 
to do it by removing his burden. The world’s 
way of giving rest is by removing a man’s yoke. 
“Not as the world giveth, give I.” The world 
would create a paradise of sluggards. The world’s 
heaven would be a life without burdens. Its gift 
of rest would be a gift of ease. “Not as the 
world giveth, give I.” That is not His way. The 
restful life is not the easeful life—tlife without 
burdens or yokes. The gift of Jesus is a gift of 
rest while wearing the yoke, rest while carrying 
the cross, rest in the very midst of mystery 
temptation, and strife. “Come unto Me, all ye 
that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give 
-you rest.” 

Now, let us look at one or two types of weary 
feet to which this Saviour will, with infinite glad- 
ness, bring the gift of rest. Look around you. 
Where would you look to find the most weary feet 
in the city? Where would you find the soul most 
tired and wearied? You would not necessarily 
find it in homes that had been the scenes of great 
and burdensome sorrow. The deepest weariness 
is not the accompaniment of the deepest grief. 
Through the darkest sorrows the soul can often 
“walk and not faint.” So that I don’t think I 
should seek out the homes of blackest sorrow if I 


REST FOR WEARY FEET g1 


wished to find the most weary life. Where then 
should we find it? Look at those twelve disciples 
who were chosen by our Lord. Which of them 
would you think experienced the deepest weari- 
ness of spirit? Would you single out Thomas, 
and say that his very proneness to doubt must 
have often filled him with deep weariness, as he 
encountered so much that was mysterious and 
perplexing? Or would you point out John, and 
say that his clear vision of the ideal life, with all 
its love and light and truth, must have created a 
deep sense of weariness as he compared the ideal 
with the real, and saw how unfriendly the world 
was to the pure and the true? Or would you 
pick out Peter, and say that a man who was 
always resolving and always failing must have 
often sunk into a profound weariness, and felt as 
though it were useless for his tired and beaten 
soul to strive any more? I think that each of 
these disciples must have known at times a really 
deep weariness of spirit, and yet I would have 
chosen none of these if I wanted to select the man 
who experienced the most terrible weariness of all. 
I should have put my hand upon Judas Iscariot. 
I should say that he knew seasons of weariness of 
which the Apostle John could not conceive. And 
why? Because he was a selfish man, the most 


g2 REST FOR WEARY FEET 


selfish heart in the disciple band. There is uo 
weariness like the weariness which gathers round 
about a selfish heart, and if we could place our 
finger upon the most selfish heart in the city, we 
should have discovered a life that moves with 
terribly weary feet. Why, such a _ character 
is a commonplace in fiction because it is 
a commonplace in life. Think of any selfish 
character in fiction whom you can call to mind, 
and you will find that he moves through dis- 
contentments and dissatisfactions and continued 
unrest. A man who lives entirely for himself 
becomes at last obnoxious to himself. I believe 
it is the very law of God that self-centredness ends 
in self-nauseousness. There is no weariness like 
the weariness of a man who is wearied of himself, 
and that is the awful Nemesis which follows the 
selfish life. I am inclined to believe that a great 
deal of the tiredness and weariness of the world, 
perhaps more than we commonly think, is only 
the sickly loathing and self-disgust arising from 
a morbid selfishness, however much we may strive 
to attribute it to something else. Be that as it 
may, there is one truth which may be proclaimed 
with absolute dogmatism, that selfishness inevit- 
ably tends to create self-nausea and weary feet. 
Well, you know what remedy we commonhy 


REST FOR WEARY FEET 93 


prescribe for such complaints. What do we say of 
the selfish man who is weary, discontented, full 
of jadedness and unrest? What do his fellows say 
of him? Theysay: “ He wants to get away from 
himself.” It is a very suggestive phrase. A man 
getting away from Azmself! For why? For rest! 
If he could only get away from himself, he would 
lose that sense of weariness and nausea, and find 
a pleasing rest. It is only another way of ex- 
pressing the truth, which is so beautifully worded 
in one of the hymns we sing, where we pray for 
“a heart at leisure from itself.” “A heart at 
leisure from itself !”——a heart that gets away from 
itself, that does not stay brooding over itself, fond- 
ling itself, nursing itself, until it loathes itself in 
weariness—a “heart at leisure from itself,” and by 
its absence from itself finding strength and rest. 
Now, listen to the Master: “Come unto Me, 
ye weary, selfish ones, and I will give you rest.” 
And how will He do it? By taking us away 
from ourselves, by giving us leisure from ourselves, 
by making us unselfish. When a weary, selfish 
heart comes to the Saviour, the Saviour meets his 
need by saying, “Take My yoke upon you.” “But, 
Lord, he is tired and weary already ; another yoke 
will crush him.” No, no; he has just been carry- 
ing himself, and himself only, and that is the 


94 REST FOR WEARY FEET 


heaviest of all loads, heavier than any man eaa 
bear. But strange it is, that if he adds anofner 
burden, his own burden will become light. nat 
is the mystery of grace, that the burdens of a 
selfish man are lightened by adding more. “Take 
My yoke upon you.” And what yoke is that, 
Lord? “The yoke of other people’s needs—the 
burdens of the blind and the deaf, and the lame 
and the lepers—the burdens of other folk’s sorrows 
—put them on to thy shoulders—take My yoke 
upon thee—increase thy burden, and thy burden 
shall become light, and instead of weariness thou 
shalt find rest.” Now, it may be that there are 
weary hearts among my hearers whose weariness 
is only the measure of their selfishness, and for 
them this old world is true. Jesus will give you 
rest by giving you His yoke; He will add to your 
burden, and so make your burden light. He will 
enlarge your thought to take in others, and so 
give you leisure from yourselves. He will take 
away your jadedness, and give you His own rest. 
You “shall run and not be weary,” you shall 
“walk and not faint.” 

But selfishness, while it accounts for much, 
does not explain all the weariness of the world. 
The weariness of selfishness can be expelled by 
unselfish Christian service. But the unselfish have 


REST FOR WEARY FEET 95 


often weary feet, and crave the gift of rest. Can 
this Saviour meet the need? Let us look around 
us, What kind of weary lives do we see? There 
are the anxious ones. The Master could see 
many of them in the crowd to whom He was 
speaking—anxious ones, living in fear of the un- 
known, not able to rest upon to-day, however 
bright and fair it be, because to-day so speedily 
changes into to-morrow, and to-morrow is all 
unknown. It is this great surrounding unknown 
which creates our anxiety and feeds it into 
strength. That dark unknown is the parent of 
our fears. Well, this anxiety, this continued 
tension of spirit, produces great spiritual exhaustion, 
The anxious soul moves with weary feet, and 
would fain meet with one who had the gift of rest. 
I say our Master saw these anxious ones among 
His hearers, and to them He cried, “Come unto 
me, ye heavy-laden ones, and I will give you 
rest.” How does He give it? I want you to 
notice the verses which immediately precede the 
words that I have quoted. I am afraid we some- 
times ignore them because of the magnificence of 
the promise that follows. But they seem to me to 
have a very close and vital connection with the 
promise itself. The Master saw how many souls 
there were who were troubled and anxious about 


96 REST FOR WEARY FEET 


the unknown. And He knew the great secret 
which, if accepted, would set all their hearts at rest. 
What did He know? He knew God! If every- 
body knew God, nobody would be anxious. He 


knew Him, and would unveil Him! “No man 
knoweth the Father save the Son, and he to 
whomsoever the Son will reveal Him.” “Come 


unto Me, ye anxious, laden ones, and I will 
give you rest. To you shall that dark unknown 
be filled with the Father’s face, and your anxiety 
shall be changed into assurance and peace.” 

Have I succeeded in making the connection 
between these verses plain? The Saviour seems 
to say, “If they only knew their Father, their 
anxiety would vanish like cloud-spots in the 
dawn. I know the Father—I will make Him 
known to them! Come unto Me, ye anxious 
ones, and by a wondrous revelation I will give 
you rest.” And so He seeks to turn weariness 
into rest by the unveiling of the Father. And in 
what strangely beautiful ways He made the 
Father known! He told them that to Providence 
there were no trifles, that God did not merely 
control great things, and allow smaller things to 
go by chance. “The very hairs of your head are 
all numbered.” Nothing is overlooked; all is 
tull of thought and purpose. “Look at that 


REST FOR WEARY FEET 97 


sparrow,” He said; “how very lightly you regard 
it: a cheap thing: two of them sold for a farthing : 
and yet your Father £zows when a sparrow falls! 
Be not anxious! God is thinking about all 
things! If the world were moving irrationally, 
without controlling thought, then anxiety would 
be natural and pardonable. But all things are 
happening in the thought of God, and God is 
Love.” That was the revelation the Saviour 
made; and will any one say that if accepted, it 
would not end the anxiety of the world, and turn 
its mind-weariness into rest? To come to Jesus 
is to take His revelation of the Father, and to 
live in the inspiration of it, and such inspiration 
would turn fear into confidence, and confidence 
into peace. Think of it. Suppose that the sky 
of our souls, instead of being an “unknown” 
which might prove treacherous, were a Father's 
face, gracious and beneficent: and suppose that 
we lived in “the light of that countenance,” and 
never lost sight of it for a day, don’t you think 
that that would create within us confidence out of 
which would spring eternal rest? The Apostle 
Paul accepted the revelation of Jesus, and lived 
in it and through it, and when dark days came, 
he quietly sang, “I know whom I have believed, 


and am persuaded that He is able.” That was 
H 


98 REST FOR WEARY FEET 


just what the Master said, “If only they knew 
Him, their anxiety would change into an un- 
troubled peace.” And here is Paul, confirming 
the Master’s word: “I know whom I have be- 
lieved, and am persuaded that He is able,” and in 
the days of darkness and persecution he remained 
steadfast and unmovable, enjoying the very rest 
of God. “Come unto Me, all ye weary, anxious 
ones, and I will reveal to you your Father, and in 
the beauty of the revelation ye shall discover the 
gift of rest.” 


VIll 


STARTLING ABSENCES 


*‘ He shall not strive, nor cry, neither shall any man hear His 
voice in the streets. A bruised reed shall He not break, and 
smoking flax shall He not quench.” —-MaTTHEWw xii. 19, 


“ Nor strive,” not “cry,” not lift up His voice “in 
the streets,” not break “the bruised reed,” not 
quench “the smoking flax”! These are some of 
the rarest and finest features of a character that 
is altogether lovely. They are negative charac- 
teristics. Certain things are suppressed, and the 
suppression reveals a consummate moral and 
spiritual beauty. The character of the Christ is 
no less unique in its striking absences than in its 
majestic presences. Its valleys are as conspicuous 
as its mountains. Its most imposing manifesta- 
tions are to be found in its restraints. Its most 
luminous revelations are ofttimes the children of 
silence. The Holy Ghost works in the way of a 
certain exclusion. His handiwork is differentiated 


100 STARTLING ABSENCES 


from all others by its incomparable restraints. 
No strife, no crying, no lifting up of the voice in 
the streets, no hastiness! In the Spirit-filled life 
“the things which are not” are as marvellous and 
_ powerful as “the things which are.” The very 
' absences are forces which startle the dull, lethargic 
world, and awake it to the discernment of a glory 
as beautiful as it is strange. My brethren, we 
have to work through these striking absences. 
The world that lieth in wickedness oft appears 
to be very uninterested both in us and in our 
message. Perhaps we are too much like the 
world we are seeking to redeem to be able to 
wake the world to any wonder. The world 
must look at the professed Christian, and behold 
the absence of itself! There are certain things 
which must not be, and their absence must 
surprise the world into a great and eager inquisi- 
tiveness. We must not strive, nor cry, nor lift 
up our voice in the streets; we must not break 
the bruised reed, nor quench the smoking flax. 
These tendencies must be suppressed, and their 
suppression must be the work of the Holy 
Ghost. 

Now mark the first of the suppressions in the 
life that is filled with the Holy Ghost. “He 
shall not strive.” He will erect no altar to the 


STARTLING ABSENCES Io 


goddess of discord. The treasure of the soul 
shall not be dribbled away in incessant squabble. 
The mind shall not waste its strength in petty 
and purposeless dispute. Life shall not be 
passed in an idle controversy. “He shall not 
strive.” The spirit of wrangling shall be absent. 
He shall have a controversy with sin. He shall 
oppose the truth to all the lofty confrontings of 
error. Falsehood he shall withstand to the face. 
But he shall not wrangle. He may differ with 
many men: he shall strive or wrangle with none. 

For what is wrangling? Wrangling is the 
spirit which subordinates the triumph of truth 
to the triumph of self. When a man begins to 
wrangle, his sight has become self-centred ; he 
has lost the vision of truth. He is seeking the 
throne for himself, and not for his God. He is 
fighting for a personal supremacy, and to gain it 
he will betray the very truth under whose banner 
he professes to serve. Wrangling creates an 
earth-born cloud which shuts out the heights and 
the depths and the breadths, obscuring the 
distant horizon and the lofty heaven, and leaving 
the soul no object of contemplation but its own 
impoverished self. When God ceases to be the 
goal of mental combatants, high controversy soon 
degenerates into small dispute. You never find 


102 STARTLING ABSENCES 


the wrangling spirit in the main highways of the 
truth. You find him in some byway, some 
blind alley, some side issue, dwelling in petty 
inferences, nursing his own vanity, far away from 
the broad, moving, regnant life of redemptive 
truth. Wrangling always nourishes itself on 
side issues. It feeds upon trifles. The littleness 
of the controversy directly ministers to the 
vanity of the controversialist. He can grasp 
the problem. He can walk all round it. There 
is no side of darkening mystery which calls for 
the removal of the shoes and an approach of 
breathless reverence and awe. He calls it “only 
a little point,” but he clings to it, and wrangles 
about it, that he may taste the sweets of a 
personal triumph. The wrangling in our Churches 
is never found in the “highway of the Lord.” 
Over that highway, we are told, the unclean 
shall never pass, and the spirit of wrangling is 
essentially unclean. No, the wrangling in the 
Churches gathers round about a trifle, not 
about the white robes, the garments of salvation, 
but about the cut of an ecclesiastical vesture ; 
not about the salvation of the world, but 
about the comparative claims of the home 
and the foreign field. I don’t see how it 
is possible for men to wrangle about the 


STARTLING ABSENCES 103 


deepest mysteries and purposes of the Christian 
faith, They may differ, and may engage in 
mutually helpful comparisons; but deep in the 
heart of a great mystery the very rarity of the 
air will suffocate the spirit of wrangling. How 
often it happens than when a meeting is beginning 
to waste itself and its strength in petty dispute, 
some speaker, of large and fruitful vision, rises, 
and, as we say, “lifts the whole subject to a 
higher plane,” and on more lofty altitudes all 
frivolous bickering is stilled. Yes, the antidote 
to wrangling is sublimity. The rare atmosphere 
of the one makes the other impossible: the 
common gazing into great mysteries hushes little 
discords into peace, 

So wrangling seeks the side issue. But Christ 
would not strive. He would not be diverted 
from the main issues of life and destiny. He 
observed a strict economy in His resources. He 
would not suffer His strength to leak away in 
frivolous dispute. He had not come to engage 
in strife, He had come that we might have life. 
He had not come to wrangle about legalities and 
trivialities, but to procure the world’s redemption. 
From that main and dominant issue He would 
never permit Himself to be seduced. “I have a 
baptism to be baptized with”; on that appalling 


104 STARTLING ABSENCES 


yet glorious way He steadfastly set His face— 
He never turned aside to wrangle—and His 
steadfastness was one of the gifts of the Spirit. 
Brethren, that is how the Spirit of the Lord will 
work in us. It will make us feel most at home 
in the heavenly places. It will make us feel 
out of place in small disputes. It will make the 
sublime our native air. It will make the super- 
natural natural unto us. Our feet shall stand 
in a large place. We shall contemplate vast 
issues. We shall live for big ends. We shall 
have no taste for the trifling. The close, foetid 
temper of wrangling will be made impossible by 
the strong pure wind that blows from the larger 
hills of love. “The servant of the Lord must 
not strive.” “I will put My Spirit upon Him 
. . « . and He shall not strive.” 

“He shall not strive, “meri Menn a) eae 
Messiah shall not cry. His coming and His 
going shall not be a shriek. And what is that 
but to say that His life shall not be sensational ? 
“He shall not cry.” There shall be nothing 
“loud” about the Master; nothing glaring, 
nothing over-emphasised, nothing over - done. 
There shall be nothing of the screech, smiting the 
senses with startling impact; nothing of the loud 
shock, nothing sensational. “He shall not cry.” 


STARTLING ABSENCES 105 


How true that is of the life of the Lord! There 
is nothing of the shriek! What an absence of 
the sensational! What an economy of power! 
What restraint! How sensational he might have 
been! “Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray 
to My Father, and He shall give Me more than 
twelve legions of angels.” “All power is given 
unto Me in heaven and in earth.” Yea, verily, 
how sensational He might have been. And yet, 
so full was He of sweet restraint that the people 
seem to have been more surprised with His 
graciousness than with His power. He had not 
come to startle, but to win; to conciliate, not 
to coerce. “Come now and let us reason 
together” was the pervading tone of His 
ministry. And so He put restraint upon His 
power, but gave no limit to His grace. He was 
almost niggardly with miracles; He was prodigal 
with love. Such is the fruit of the Spirit! The 
man who is filled with the Spirit of God has no 
desire to make a sensation. “He shall not cry.” 
The shriek is absent. His lightning commonly 
sheds itself abroad as sunbeams. His thunder 
commonly breaks itself up into the music of 
gracious speech. His life is not loud. All he 
asks is “room to deny Himself”; “content to fill 
a little space if God be glorified.” 


106 STARTLING ABSENCES 


“He shall not strive, nor cry.” Wrangling 
is absent. Loudness is absent. “ Neither shall 
any man hear His voice in the streets,” : How 
true is that word concerning the Lord: “ Neither 
shall any man hear His voice in the streets.” 
Christ abhorred a mere street-religion. He 
loved the religion that prayed and glowed in the 
closet, and that radiated its influence out into 
the street. But a mere street-religion he hated. 
He told us more than once of men who love to 
“pray standing at the corner of the street that 
they may be seen of men,” and He bade us be 
not like unto them. He could not do with a 
piety that advertised itself to gain public applause. 
No man, says my text, shall “hear His voice in 
the streets.” If he went to pray, then the mid- 
night or the early dawn shall be a convenient 
season, and the desert or some remote height 
shall be an appropriate place. “ Thou, when thou 
prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast 
shut thy door pray to thy Father which is in 
secret.” No man shall hear the Master in a self- 
advertising piety ; no man shall hear His voice in 
the streets engaged in a notoriety hunt, which 
seeks its ends by the use of unctuous speech. He 
who is truly anointed with the Holy Ghost, when 
he does lift up his voice, shall do it not to adver- 


STARTLING ABSENCES 107 


tise himself, but, I say with reverence, to advertise 
his God. Christ revealed the Father! Again 
and again He seemed to wrestle with the 
imperfections of human speech, to make it clear 
to us that He sought alone the honour and the 
glory of His Fathers name. He was always 
drawing back the curtain. “The words that ye 
hear are not mine.” “I speak not of Myself.” 
“The Father that dwelleth in Me, He doeth the 
works.” Not to honour Himself, for then He 
said His honour would be nothing, but to honour 
His Father—that was the end and purpose of 
speech and of work. Such is the fruit of the 
Spirit. “I will put My Spirit upon Him” .... 
and no man “shall hear His voice in the street.” 
When the Holy Spirit possesses a man, religion is 
not an affair of the street corner; it is not a 
medium of self-advertisement ; it is not a means 
for gaining public applause. Life, filled with 
the Spirit, “vaunteth not itself,” it hides under 
“the shadow of the Almighty,” and it makes its 
boast in God. 

“He shall not strive.” Wrangling shall be 
absent. “He shall not cry.” Loudness shall 
be absent. “Neither shall any man hear His 
voice in the street.” Self-advertisement shall be 
absent. “A bruised reed shall He not break, 


108 STARTLING ABSENCES 


and smoking flax shall He not quench.” Then 
there is to be an absence of harshness, an absence 
of severe pitilessness, an absence of that spirit of 
savage recoil from those who have deceived us. 
You cut a reed from its root and, as is a very 
common custom in Syria to-day, you use it as a 
staff on which to lean. When the road leaves 
the plain, and begins to climb the hill, you place 
a weightier dependence upon your support, you 
lean more heavily upon your staff, and often it 
happens that the poor reed yields before the 
confiding pressure and fails you, becoming 
cracked and bruised. Now what can you do 
with a reed which has failed you, which has 
collapsed beneath your weight just when you 
needed its support ? Why, complete the de- 
struction. Break it impatiently into a dozen 
pieces and cast it aside as a worthless thing. 
And is not this a symbol of how we too com- 
monly treat our brethren who have failed us? 
We counted upon their faithfulness. We trust- 
ingly leaned upon them in a moment of peculiar 
strain. We depended upon them in some high 
crisis of our affairs, and they failed us. They 
broke their word. They betrayed our trust. 
The staff became a bruised reed. How prone 
we are to deal harshly with them! How inclined 


STARTLING ABSENCES 109 


we are to manifest towards them an indignation 
which has in it more of chagrin at our own 
disappointment than of zeal for the honour of 
our Lord! With what hasty impatience we 
cast off the treacherous brother, and throw him 
aside as an utterly worthless and hopeless thing! 
But that was not the Master’s way. He would 
not “break the bruised reed.” He was tenderly 
pitiful towards men who had failed. He would 
not “quench the smoking flax.” When the oil 
in the lamp failed, and the genial and cheering 
flame became an offensive smoke, when religious 
devotion in some life was sadly changing into 
a cool formality, when a bright enthusiasm 
smouldered down into an interest that was only 
lukewarm, when fervour was turning into in- 
difference, when He beheld symptoms of spiritual 
decline, He would not quench the smoking flax 
by an outpouring of suspicion or contempt. The 
Lord was ever pitiful with the faint-hearted, with 
those whose light was burning only dimly, and He 
ever sought, by a tender and reinforcing sympathy, 
to nurse them back again into a bright and 
passionate spiritual life. My brethren, don’t you 
think this is a grace of which we have peculiar 
need to-day—tenderness towards failures? Is it 
not the special equipment of the Christian 


110 STARTLING ABSENCES 


ministry—a disposition which seeks to heal those 
that are bruised, a disposition which seeks to 
restore those who, when a demand was made 
upon their resources, failed and collapsed before 
the strain? I think it is not without suggestion 
that in that radiant list of graces which the 
Apostle Paul has enumerated as the adornments 
of the Christian life, he gives the first place to the 
grace of pity. “Put ye on a heart of pity.” 
Brethren, be it ours to startle and to win the 
world by the absence in our life of pitilessness 
and harshness and all selfish severity. Be it ours 
to win our spiritual conquests by a persistent and 
confiding hopefulness, not breaking the bruised 
reed, not quenching the smoking flax, but seeking 
the restoration of our brother by a willing and 
prodigal communication of ourselves in the spiritual 
treasures which have been given to us by God. 


IX 


THE ENERGY OF GRACE 


*¢In whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness 
of sins, according to the riches of His grace, wherein He hath 
abounded towards us in all wisdom and prudence.”—EPu. i. 
7, 3. 


“ ACCORDING to the riches of His grace, wherein 
He hath abounded towards us.” I recently pro- 
nounced the words aloud as I walked alone in a 
beautiful twilight by the fringe of the incoming 
sea, The truth in nature seemed to recognise the 
truth in revelation. They appeared to grasp 
hands, Deep called unto deep, and they offered 
each other the help of a mutual interpretation. 
It is wonderful how frequently an old and un- 
suggestive word will glow with vivid significance 
when proclaimed in new surroundings! “Let 
your speech be always with grace, seasoned with 
salt.” I read these words when standing upon a 
bold headland, on a day of warm and genial light, 
with a little breeze playing through it, which was 


112 THE ENERGY OF GRACE 


burdened with the essence of the brine; and the 
one offered itself as commentary upon the other. 
I knew the meaning of sanctified conversation, 
intercourse that is warm and genial and cheering, 
and yet bracing and invigorating by reason of the 
truth-laden spirit which blows from the infinite. 
“Always with grace, yet seasoned with salt.” 
“ Renewed by His spirit in the inner man.” The 
word repeated itself to me with acquired emphasis 
as I emerged from a sultry glebe, where the 
atmosphere had been close and stagnant and 
oppressive, and I stood in the pure, cool, moving 
air of the heights. “Refreshed by His spirit in 
the inner man.” And once again I read the 
words of my text to the accompaniment of the 
jubilant roar and the majestic advance of the 
incoming tide. “According to the riches of His 
grace, wherein He hath abounded towards us!” 
The onrush of the ocean seemed to get into the 
words. I could feel a magnificent tidal flow in 
the great evangel. The infinite was moving in 
determined fulness. The grace of the Eternal 
was rolling towards the race in a wealthy and 
glorious flood. “According to the riches of His 
grace, wherein He hath abounded towards us.” 

I am grateful for this comment of the ocean 
tide. I am grateful for its suggestion of unspeak- 


THE ENERGY OF GRACE 113 


able energy in the ministry of grace. Grace is 
too commonly regarded as a pleasing sentiment, a 
sofa disposition, a welcome feeling of cosy favour 
entertained toward us by our God. The inter- 
pretation is ineffective, and inevitably cripples the 
life in which it prevails. Grace is more than a 
smile of good-nature. It is not the shimmering 
face of an illumined lake; it is the sun-lit majesty 
of an advancing sea. It is a transcendent and 
ineffable force, the outgoing energies of the 
redeeming personality of God washing against the 
polluted shores of human need. 

How inclined we are to think meanly and 
narrowly of spiritual ministries! How we belittle 
and impoverish their dominion! We think more 
largely concerning the palpable ministries of the 
material world. How spaciously we think of the 
empire of electrical force, the subtle fluid which 
annihilates space. But when we turn to finer 
subtilties still, our thinking is inclined to move 
more timidly, and with a severely circumscribed 
range. Turn the mind upon itself. Here is a 
spiritual entity. What is thought? Is it only a 
faint effluence of the mind that remains locked up 
within the limits of one’s own personality? Is 
thought only a perfume or a stench which dies away 


within the confines in which it is born? Or is 
1 


114 THE ENERGY OF GRACE 


thought an energy, more potent and pervasive 
than the electrical fluid, disregarding the limits of 
personality, and moving irresistibly and inevitably 
from life to life? What if we cannot dam it up? 
What if thought will be out, and whether we will 
or no, becomes an operative factor in the common 
life? That is the larger and sounder way of 
regarding spiritual essences. Thought is energy. 
Purpose is energy. Good-will is energy. And 
even though we withhold from them the vehicles 
of speech and act, they will nevertheless express 
themselves, by the very reason of their being, as 
influential ministers in the life of men. 

Now lift up the argument to a still higher 
plane. I gaze into the wealthy content of this 
spacious word “grace.” Whatever else it may 
mean, or does not mean, it includes thought, and 
purpose, and good-will, and love; and we do it 
wrong, and therefore maim ourselves, if we esteem 
it only as a perfumed sentiment, a favourable 
inclination, and not as a glorious energy moving 
towards the race with the fulness and majesty of 
the ocean tide. Wherever I turn in the Sacred 
Book I find the mystic energy at work. It 
operates in a hundred diverse ways, but in every 
instance it works and energises as an unspeakable 
force. Let me cull a little handful of examples 


THE ENERGY OF GRACE T15 


from the old Book. “Let each man do according 
as he hath purposed in his heart, for God is able 
to make all grace abound unto you.” Do you 
catch the swift and vital connection? “Let each 
man do,” for “God will make grace abound.” 
Grace is the dynamic of endeavour! “We have 
good hope through grace.” “We have good 
hope!” The lamp is kept burning. The 
cheery light does not die out in the life. All 
the rooms are lit up. Our confidence fails not. 
“We have good hope through grace.” Grace is 
the nourisher of optimism. “Singing with grace 
in your hearts.” How beautiful the relation 
and succession! Grace in the heart—a song 
in the mouth! Grace is the spring of a grateful 
contentment. “It is good that the heart be 
established through grace.” There we are away 
in the basement, among the foundations of the 
life. “Establishing the heart through grace.” 
Grace is the secret energy of a fortified will. And 
so in countless other places I find the grace of 
God working away in human life as an energy 
whose operations are as manifold as the ministries 
of the light. And now the apostle tells me that 
this redeeming, energising effluence flows towards 
the race in all the spacious plenitude of a flood. 
Grace does not flow from a half-reluctant and 


116 THE ENERGY OF GRACE 


partially reconciled God, like the scanty and 
uncertain movements of a brook in time of 
drought. It comes in oceanic fulness. It comes 
in “riches of mercy,” “riches of goodness, and 
forbearance, and long suffering,” “riches of glory.” 
“According to the riches of His grace, wherein 
He hath abounded towards us.” “O the depth 
of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge 


of God.” 


Thy goodness and Thy truth to me, 
To every soul abound, 

A vast unfathomable sea, 
Where all our thoughts are drowned. 

Its streams the whole creation reach, 
So plenteous in the store: 

Enough for all, enough for each, 
Enough for evermore. 


Now in my text the energies of grace are 
more particularly discovered in their relationship 
to sin. “Forgiveness of sins according to the 
riches of His grace.” The word “grace” is not a 
prevalent word in modern speech, and its rare 
occurrence may be explained by the partial dis- 
appearance of the word “sin” from our vocabu- 
‘ Tary. If we exile the one we shall not long 
retain the other. Grace haunts the place where 
pangs are endured and tears are shed because of 


af 


THE ENERGY OF GRACE 117 


the sense of indwelling sin. “ Where sin abounds, 
grace doth much more abound.” But you may 
ransack the books of the passing day, and though 
the life depicted moves among many crooked- 
nesses, and perversities, and uncleannesses, there 
is little or no suggestion of the sense of sin. I 
do not say it is not there, but men are unfavour- 
ably disposed toward the word, and are inclined 
to banish it from their vocabulary. Sin is a 
word whose familiar significances are like sharp 
fangs, and they bite deep into the life. Men are 
now very busy attempting to draw the teeth of 
the old rodent, and to leave him with a pair of 
harmless gums. We are busy creating easier and 
less distressing phrases, phrases without teeth, 
which we can apply to our perversities and de 
formities without occasioning us any pain. The 
prevalent philosophy is a little favourable to 
our much-sought-for deliverance. You know the 
welcome opiates it offers to our uneasy conscious- 
ness. It declares that what is called sin is only 
the result of imperfect knowledge. But the 
philosophy does not build itself upon the facts 
of common experience. Where ignorance reigns, 
the sense of sin does not prevail. Where there 
is a sense of sin a man is conscious that he had 
the requisite’ knowledge. Where a man can say, 


118 THE ENERGY OF GRACE 


“T did it ignorantly,” his inner life may be dis- 
tressed, but not with the consciousness of guilt. 
For him, in this relationship, sin does not exist. 
“Sin is inevitable,” says another prevalent philo- 
sophy, “so long as we are bound to a sensuous 
body. Our union with the flesh is the necessary 
occasion of all our sin.” But all sin is not the 
necessary accompaniment of sense. If men were 
to be stripped of their bodies to-day, the realm 
of sin would still remain, envy would remain, and 
malice and wrath, and so would thought and 
desire and will. No, these philosophic extenua- 
tions do not root themselves in the well-recognised 
facts of the individual life, and so will not bring 
any permanent peace to men. What philosophy 
and personal inclination are disposed to extenuate, 
the Christian religion seeks to deepen and revive, 
Its purpose and endeavour is not to abate the 
uneasy sense of sin, but to drive the teeth into 
still more sensitive parts. There is no mincing, 
apologising delicacy in the way in which it de- 
scribes the natural conditions of my life. It 
makes no attempt at discovering more favourable 
considerations which will set me more at ease, 
Its revealing sentences are clear and uncompro- 
mising. “Sin dwelleth in me.” I have opened 
the door of my life, and have invited sin to be 


THE ENERGY OF GRACE 119 


my guest, and accept my hospitality. “Sin 
reigneth in me.” The guest has become the 
master, and determines the arrangements of the 
house. I am “the bond-slave of sin.” Sin is 
not merely my guest, not only my master, he is 
my tyrant, with his heavy hand upon the neck, 
holding me down, thrusting me along his own 
determined way. I am “dead in sin”; I am 
become a mere chattel, my tyrant’s dead imple- 
ment used in the evil ministry of the devil. I 
am “dead in sin,” not a finely-rigged and self- 
determining boat, with power to encounter adverse 
winds, and to ride upon the storm, but a piece 
of dead driftwood, a poor hull, with its power of 
self-initiative and self-direction gone, the pitiless 
prey of the hostile wind and the engulfing waves. 
“Dead in trespasses and sin.” That is the 
scriptural indictment of the sin-possessed man. 
Indictment, do I say? I recall the word; it is 
the scriptural portrait of the sin-ridden life, and 
I say that the common heart of man acknowledges 
the accuracy of it, and brushes all attempted 
extenuations on one side, as being beside the 
mark, and having no relevancy and pertinacy to 
man’s appalling need. “Cleanse me from its 
guilt and power.” Guilt and Power! Those are 
the two deadly facts of sin, and they are witnessed 


120 THE ENERGY OF GRACE 


to in the common life. I look round and within 
me, and the evidence abounds. If I interpret my 
own heart aright, the sense of guilt is signified 
in more ways than by audible confession and 
sighs. The sense of guilt has a very varied 
wardrobe. It is not always found in sackcloth 
and ashes, lowly kneeling or smiting the breast. 
I have seen it dressed as flippancy; I have 
known it put on the guise of a jaunty carelessness ; 
I have known it issue as forced laughter; I have 
seen it evidenced in a passionate recoil against 
religion. John Wesley tells us in his incompar- 
able journal, that when he was about twenty-two, 
before he had felt the tidal powers of redeeming 
grace, he took up and read Kempis’s The Christzan’s 
Pattern, and he began to “see that true religion 
was seated in the heart, and that God’s law 
extended to all our thoughts as well as words 
and actions. J was, however, very angry with 
Kempis for being too strict.” Is that a surprising 
consequence? I thought that this enlarged 
vision of the searching demands of God’s law 
would have drawn him to his knees in humble 
and contrite confession of sin! “I was, however, 
very angry with Kempis for being too strict.” 
The consciousness of guilt emerged in the guise 
of anger in a heated recoil from the man who 


THE ENERGY OF GRACE 121 


had searched him in the inward parts. So that 
I do not look merely for kneeling and tearful 
worshippers when I want evidence of the conscious- 
ness of sin. I can see it in loud living, in violent 
and sensational pleasures, in proudly assured 
indifference, in the anger aroused by august 
ideals, in passionate aversions to the teachings 
of evangelical religion. To rummage among the 
secrets of the heart, and to survey the symptoms 
of the external life is to find abounding witness 
that man is held in dark and cruel servitude by 
the “guilt and power ” of sin. 

And now to this sin- burdened and sin- 
poisoned race there flows, in infinite plenitude, the 
“riches of His grace.” What is the ministry 
of the heavenly energy? What are the contents 
of the gracious flood? The inspiring evangel of 
the text gathers itself round about three emphases. 
I am told that when grace possesses the life, it 
brings in its resources a three-fold power. It 
brings “redemption,” the powers of liberation ; it 
brings “wisdom,” the power of illumination; it 
brings “ prudence,” the power of practically apply- 
ing the illumination to the manifold exigencies 
of the common life. Let us feast our eyes on 
the wealthy programme. Grace flows round 
about the life in powers of liberation. It sets 


122 THE ENERGY OF GRACE 


itself to deal both with the guilt and the power of 
sin, and it removes the one, and subdues the other. 
The Bible seems to exhaust all available figures in 
seeking to make it clear to men how effective and 
absolute is the liberation accomplished by grace. 
Here is a little handful gathered in a field in 
which they abound. “Your sins may be Jdlotted 
out!” “Blotted out!” It is the same word 
which is used in another beautiful promise: “God 
shall wipe away all tears.” Your sins shall be 
wiped away! Just as you may wipe a tear away 
from the eye of a child, and its place is taken by 
sunny light, and no print remains of the grievous 
presence, so our Father will wipe away our sins 
by the energies of His grace. “The Lamb of 
God, who ‘¢aketh away the sin of the world.” 
“Taketh away!” . It is the word which is used in 
another familiar phrase: “they found the stone 
taken away.” “He taketh away the sin of the 
world,” the huge, unliftable stone, before which we 
stood in paralysing despair, He taketh it away. 
“He shall wash away thy sin.” The ministry of 
soft and genial water! When a little child, with 
slightly afflicted eyes, awakens in the morning 
and finds that her eyes are fastened by the clog 
which has accumulated through the night, the 
mother takes some balmy water, and gently 


THE ENERGY OF GRACE 123 


washes away the ill cement, and the little one 
opens her eyes upon the morning light. And 
when the glue of guilt has gathered about the 
powers of my life, and holds their activities in 
depressing and fearful servitude, the stringent, 
healing energy of grace washes away the encum- 
brance, and the powers of the soul exult in newly- 
discovered liberty and light. “He shall wash 
away thy sin.” And so I might proceed with the 
wealthy array of Scriptural figures. Our sins are 
to be “blotted out”; they are to be “taken 
away”; they are to be “washed away”; they are 
to be “covered”; they are to be “ purged” ; and 
all this wealth of metaphor is intended to pro- 
claim the completeness of. the emancipation 
accomplished by these marvellous energies of 
grace. We have redemption, even the forgiveness 
of sin, “according to the riches of His grace which 
He hath abounded towards us.” 

But this by no means exhausts the contents of 
the ministry of grace. The grace that liberates 
also illuminates. The grace that brings “ redemp- 
tion” also confers “wisdom.” Our opened eyes 
are to be fed and feasted with ever more glorious 
unveilings of the Eternal. We are to obtain 
more and more spacious conceptions of truth, 
richer and profounder knowledge of God. Oh, 


124 THE ENERGY OF GRACE 


what vistas of knowledge are promised to the 
grace-filled life! “That ye may know what is 
the hope of His calling, what the riches of the 
glory of His inheritance in the saints.” “To 
know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge.” 
“That ye may know/” “That ye may know!” 
That is the reiterated emphasis of the word of 
promise. The grace that lifts up also lights up. 
The new birth is succeeded by new visions, and 
the new visions refine and beautify the life. That 
is the ministry of all vision. The vision soaks 
into the life and colours it with its own hue. 
“We all with open face deholding . .. the glory 
of the Lord, are transformed into the same image.” 
The nature of our contemplation determines the 
quality and colour of our life. 

“Redemption,” power of liberation! “Wisdom,” 
power of illumination! And “prudence,” power 
of fruitful application; power to apply the eternal 
to the transient; power to bring the vision 
to the task, the revelation to the duty, the truth 
to the trifle. Grace will not confine its operations 
to the clouds. It will flow up into the practi- 
calities and prudences of common daily life. It 
will prove itself the dynamic of the ordinary day, 
There is many a man possessed of knowledge who 
does not know how to apply it. But grace does 


THE ENERGY OF GRACE 125 


not leave a man in the vacuity and impotence of 
mere theory. The gift of grace is not only the 
gift of vision, but the gift of power to realise the 
vision in the humdrum concerns of the unattractive 
life. 

Now how do we come into the sweep of the 
marvellous effluence of the grace of God? “in 
whom we have.” That is the standing - ground. 
I know no other. To be in Him, in the Christ, is 
to be in the abiding-place of this superlative energy. 
To be associated with the Saviour, by faith, in the 
fellowship of spiritual communion, is to dwell at 
the springs of eternal life. 


Jesus sought me when a stranger, 
Wandering from the fold of God; 

He, to rescue me from danger, 
Interposed His precious blood. 

Oh, to grace how great a debtor 
Daily I’m constrained to be! 

Let thy grace, Lord, like a fetter, 
Bind my wandering heart to Thee. 


x 


THE PERSISTENT INFLUENCE OF 
FIRST IDEAS 


‘‘T have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear 
them now.”—JOHN xvi. I2. 


“YE cannot bear them now.” Your hands are 
infantile. Your baby fingers could not wrap 
themselves around the load. Your grasp and 
carrying power are immature. There are many 
mysteries waiting to be unveiled, but your untried 
eyes are unable to “bear the burning bliss.” 
There are many truths all clamouring to be pro- 
claimed, but your powers of apprehension are not 
equal to the strain. The burden must be suited 
to the hand. I must let in the light as your eyes 
are able to bear it. “I have yet many things to 
say unto you, but you cannot bear them now.” 
Here, then, is the principle involved in the 
text. Capacity must determine revelation. 
Mature doctrine must not be given to immature 


INFLUENCE OF FIRST IDEAS 127 


minds. An excessive burden will maim the 
muscle it was proposed to exercise. An ill- 
proportioned revelation will paralyse the very 
life it was intended to feed. That is the vital 
principle enshrined in my text. There must be 
some correspondence between the revelation and 
my powers of reception. I must be able to bear 
the truth revealed. Truth must wait upon life. 
She must watch for the growing hand, and to 
the increased grasp she must entrust her larger 
treasure. “What revelations shall I make to 
my children?” Well, what are they able to bear? 
What is their carrying power? What is the size 
of their hands? What is the scope of their 
apprehension? It requires a good deal of living 
for a little bit of knowing—How much have they 
lived? It is here we must begin as the unveilers 
of the Christian revelation to the mind and hearts 
of the young. We must follow the example of the 
Master. It is not enough to teach the truth. It 
must be taught with discrimination. It must be 
adapted to aptitude. It must be proportioned to 
grasp. It must be doled out with wise restraint, 
and we must rigorously withhold everything which 
our children are as yet unable to bear. There is 
no novelty in this principle. It finds repeated em- 
phasis throughout the New Testament Scriptures. 


128 THE PERSISTENT INFLUENCE 


Here and there it is referred to under the figure 
of a diet, and from the figure one can easily infer 
the apostolic conception of the religious instruction 
of the young. Some are to be fed with milk, and 
not with strong meat. The food is to be adapted 
to the system, the doctrine to the years. We 
neglect that principle at our peril. Even on the 
purely physical plane, inattention to the diet of 
childhood may be the cause of a black stream of 
melancholy and depression running right through 
the years. Careless feeding in early years can 
impair the digestive organs for a lifetime. There 
is many a dyspeptic, pessimistic and pain-ridden, 
drowsily crawling about in the prime of his years, 
whose languor and partial paralysis may be traced 
to the indiscriminate feeding of his childhood. 
And there are moral and spiritual dyspeptics, 
with little or no healthy hunger, with no forceful, 
active powers to apprehend religious truth, with 
no sound spiritual digestion, whose pitiable in- 
capacity was created in an unwise religious child- 
hood. They were over-weighted with truths which 
they were unable to assimilate. Their spiritual 
susceptibilities were impaired. Their food became 
their burden. They were not able to bear it, 
being fed with strong meat when they ought to 
have been fed with milk. Young minds must be 


. now. 


OF FIRST IDEAS 129 


fed on simple food ; their diet must be elemental. 
The truth we offer them must be alphabetic. We 
must observe the principle that all things are 
not fitting, that many things must be held in 
reserve until capacity is more matured. “These 
things I said not unto you at the beginning.” 
What things? Why, the great appalling things, 
the midnight things, the things which would have 
stunned the disciples into benumbment, and 
paralysed them with fear: these the gentle 
Teacher said not unto them “at the beginning.” 
He reserved them for a later lesson, when they could 
be introduced without any fear of injuring their 
timid and sensitive souls. “I have yet many 
things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them 

If this, then, is to be the principle of in- 
struction, if we are to recognise the law of reserve 
in our declaration of truth, if the harder teachings 
must be kept for the maturer years and the 
simpler teachings for the younger years, it is of 
infinite importance that the simpler teachings be 
scrupulously true. Alongside the principle of re- 
serve this second principle must be given an equal 
place, that nothing must be taught in childhood 
which will need to be unlearnt in manhood. Early 


religious teaching is not a makeshift. It is not 
K 


130 THE PERSISTENT INFLUENCE 


a temporary garment which our children will be 
able to discard as easily as they discard their 
worn-out frocks. We walk in unspeakable error 
if we approach our little children on the under- 
standing that we will give them a thought, a 
religious idea, a spiritual conception, which will 
last them until they are seventeen years of age, 
and which may then be laid aside for another. 
The most difficult of all things is to forsake a 
thought. To forsake a way is comparatively 
easy ; but to take an idea which has possessed 
us for years and strip it from the mind, and 
throw it aside as an old-fashioned or worn-out 
rag, and leave it there behind us in the years, is 
a stupendous and appalling task. And all this 
is peculiarly true of ideas that are given to us in 
our earliest days. We cannot exaggerate the 
intensity of first impressions; they bite deep into 
the mind, and are almost ineffaceable. Our old 
people cannot recall the days that are near, but 
they have no difficulty in reviving the deep-cut 
impressions of a far-off youth. It is childhood 
that lives again in age. It is the earliest con- 
sciousness that reappears in the latest days of 
decline. The first impressions persist through 
the life. I find the symbol of the experience in 
those composite photographs with which we have 


OF FIRST IDEAS 131 


of late become familiarised. One impression is 
photographed upon another, to which it is quite 
unlike, and then a third, altogether dissimilar, is 
photographed upon the previous product, and so 
on and so on, with increasing additions; but the 
first and original impression persists, remaining 
as a pervading influence, modifying all succeeding 
impressions, and asserting itself in the ultimate 
product. I say it is even so with life. The first 
impressions photographed upon the mind are 
not effaced by succeeding impressions. The first 
ideas are not obliterated by the ideas of a later 
day. First ideas remain, pervading and modi- 
fying the thought of the entire life, and persisting 
in our conduct even when they have been deposed 
by the judgment. 

Take, for instance, our first thoughts about the 
darkness. Many of us gained an early impression— 
alas! many of us were taught it—that the darkness 
was the residence of things “uncanny,” of bogeys 
and goblins, and I know not what, who would 
steal out and kidnap little children if they were 
not obedient and good. How rarely one meets a 
little child who is not afraid of the darkness! 
Well, we are now men and women. We have put 
away the childish thing Have we? It has been 
liscarded by the judgment ; is it exiled from the 


132 THE PERSISTENT INFLUENCE 


life? Does it not persist in our demeanour to- 
day? Is the darkness even to-day just what it 
might have been had we never received that 
earliest thought? Is the nerve altogether free 
from that first idea? 

If ideas are so persistent, if early ideas are so 
dominant and despotic, is it not needful to empha- 
sise the principle that there must be nothing about 
the teaching we give to little children which we 
should not like them to carry with them through 
the years? There must be nothing which will 
need to be forsaken, for forsaken it can never be! 
Our teaching must assume the need of subsequent 
expansion; it must never assume the need of 
subsequent expulsion. We respect this principle 
in the impartation of common knowledge. In 
secular instruction we teach our child that twice 
one are two. That is elementary and alphabetic, 
but it is a statement which will remain good 
throughout his days. It will be as safe at three- 
score years and ten as it is at five. Whatever 
expansion it may receive, into whatever complica- 
tion it may enter, whatever combinations it may 
share, it will never require expulsion. It should 
be even so in all instruction which we name 
religious. The alphabetic must not be the untrue. 
The simple must not be a makeshift. Every 


OF FIRST IDEAS 133 


idea we impart to the minds of our children should 
be a seed, a germ which will expand with the 
expansion of the powers and the increase of the 
years. If the ideas are not seeds, seeds of eternal 
truth—small, if you like, as grains of mustard-seed 
—if they are not seeds, they are stones, infertile, 
burdensome stones, which in a few years will 
become “stones of stumbling,” and “rocks of 
offence,” over which our children will be in danger 
of falling into moral and spiritual confusion. 

Now, of these simple, germinal teachings, the 
most vitally important are the conceptions of the 
being and character of God. The ideas we give 
. the children concerning God must be ideas which 
their capacity can bear, and which will never need 
to be expelled. The revelations must be as milk- 
food, which will nourish and strengthen the powers 
of apprehension for the assimilation of stronger 
food in after years. The first idea of God strikes 
deep. You cannot give your child one conception 
of God to-day, and wipe it out again to-morrow. 
The first conception remains, and if it be false or 
unworthy it will persist as a disturbing and dis- 
torting and corrupting influence throughout the 
entire life. Where do our children obtain their 
first ideas of God? Sometimes from a picture. 
A glance can determine the colour of a life. My 


134 THE PERSISTENT INFLUENCE 


mind is even to-day haunted with unworthy 
representations of the Almighty which have hung 
in my chamber of imagery from the days of my 
childhood. I see Him now, a tearless cynical 
God, indifferently smiling upon a Dives who is 
writhing in terrible tongues of flame. I see Him 
now, in another picture, with the face of a cunning 
trickster, while Abraham stands with uplifted blade 
to slay his only son. Long ago my judgment 
condemned the image as false and sentenced it to 
exile. But through my childhood it persisted, 
and even to-day, when I turn to the old story, the 
false image steals back, and seeks to imprint its 
lines and colours upon my most matured thought. 
So subtle and so strenuous and so despotic is an 
early pictorial representation of the Eternal God. 

Where do our children obtain their earliest 
ideas of God? Sometimes from a hymn. I 
vividly remember that when I was quite a little 
mite we used to occasionally sing a hymn which 
bore the heading, “ To be sung on the death of a 
scholar,” and there were two lines of the hymn 
which used to make me shake with fear— 


We do not know who next may fall 
Beneath Thy chastening rod, 


What did that mean to a child? I ask not what 


OF FIRST IDEAS 135 


it meant to the matured apprehension of adults. 
What meant it to a little child? A God, with a 
rod, before whose blows little children stumbled 
and fell, and had to be carried away from their 
weeping mothers, and laid I knew not where! 
That was the child’s God, and it filled me so full 
of fear that I had no room for love. The revela- 
tion was beyond my carrying power—I had not 
strength to bear it! Let us jealously inspect 
every hymn which enshrines a conception of God, 
and let every picture which offers a caricature of 
the Eternal be consigned to swift destruction. 
What, then, shall be our first and elementary 
teachings concerning God? What shall be the 
character of the earliest revelations? What are 
the children able to bear? Suppose it were per- 
mitted you to give your little child just one 
glimpse of the life of Jesus, and suppose that from 
that glimpse it were to be his fate to obtain his 
first conception of God, what aspect of the 
Saviour’s life would you make your choice? 
Mark well your choice. Note its character and 
tone. You will find, I think, that you have 
chosen a very sunny picture, full of sweetness and 
light. And such ought to be the character of the 
earliest revelations. They should be brimming 
with soft and inviting sunshine. It may be needful 


136 THE PERSISTENT INFLUENCE 


at a later day to analyse the light, and reveal the 
darker elements of severity which share in the 
composition of the pure, white ray, but in the 
earliest day “suffer the little children” to just 
bask in the sunny baptism, with all the free and 
untroubled affection of young and fearless hearts. 
They can carry the sunshine, and not be heavy- 
ladened. Other things may wait. They can be 
given to the larger mind. But with the little ones 
let us “lead on softly,” following the example of 
our Master the Christ. “I have yet many things 
to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now.” 
But I think there is need that we not only give 
our children such elementary conceptions of the 
character of God as will never need to be unlearnt, 
but also some true, if alphabetic conceptions, as to 
the mode of His communion with us. It is not 
enough to teach our children what God is like; 
we must offer some true if elementary suggestions 
as to how He draws near to us. Even though we 
have saved them from an appalling and repellant 
misrepresentation of God, they may still be con- 
founded and disturbed by ignorance as to how He 
visits and abides with us. The withholding of 
simplicities may be as burdensome as the imposi- 
tion of an excessive revelation. I am persuaded 
that many of our children are spiritually starved 


OF FIRST IDEAS 137 


and checked in their religious growth because we 
have left it to chance to make known to them how 
to discern the coming and presence of the Eternal 
God. They are craving for an explanation, and 
we too frequently offer them a heavy, burdensome, 
and meaningless phrase. For instance, they hear 
the teacher or the preacher make the frequent 
appeal in the prayer with which the service begins, 
“May we feel Thy presence in our midst to-day,” 
and at the conclusion of the service they hear a 
familiar expression of praise,“We thank Thee 
that Thou hast made Thy presence felt among 
us.” Have our children any inkling of the mean- 
ing of the words? Are not the phrases quite 
beyond their grasp, signs without significance, 
leaving the mind in absolute and perilous vacancy ? 
We must not leave these things to chance. When 
we have taught the little lives what God is, I know 
of nothing more exceedingly precious than to 
teach them how to recognise God’s touch. Cannot 
we give our children some tiny system of—don’t 
be afraid of the phrase—elementary psychology, 
some simple ideas of the inner life, and of how 
the great Spirit moves about it in quickening and 
in hallowing influence. The teaching must be 
exceedingly elementary, but scrupulously true. It 
must be germinal truth, to which much may be 


138 THE PERSISTENT INFLUENCE 


added, but from which nothing shall need to be 
withdrawn. The problem is this, How can we 
teach our children to recognise the touch of the 
Lord, so that in public and in private services they 
may know Him, and be able to enter sympatheti- 
cally into thanksgiving that His presence has been 
felt? Can this be taught, or have our children to 
linger on in a hardening mental vacancy until 
childhood has been left behind? I believe such 
teaching can be given, and if it can, then it is our 
privilege and duty to give it. 

How much can we tell them? This much of 
psychology, at any rate, may be given to them. 
We may tell them that in the inner and unseen 
life of each there is something called thought, and 
something called feeling, and something called 
will, and that when the great and unseen God 
comes near to us He dwells especially round about 
these three, and that in these three we may 
recognise His presence and feel His touch. How 
may we know the touch of God in our thought? 
Here is a word of the Lord God: “ My thoughts 
are not your thoughts.” What are Thy thoughts 
like, good Lord? “As the heavens are higher 
than the earth, so are My thoughts higher than 
your thoughts.” In God’s thoughts there is no 
littleness, no meanness. God’s thoughts are large, 


OF FIRST IDEAS 139 


lofty, and spacious, and such does He purpose 
should be the thoughts of all men, big with the 
gracious bounteousness of an expansive heaven, 
When therefore the good Lord comes near to me, 
He visits my thought, and by this sign may I 
know His touch. If my poor little selfish thought, 
that just covers myself, like a petty tent, begins 
to widen and heighten until it spreads over my 
brethren like a canopy of heavenly benediction, the 
enlargement is a sure indication that the great 
Wonder-Worker has touched me, turning the little 
one into a thousand, and a contracted interest into 
a spacious vision. Cannot we teach our children 
this mode of recognising the presence of God? 
Cannot we tell them that when they engage in the 
worship of the sanctuary, or when they pray in the 
privacy of their own home, or when they are 
walking in the common way, in school or at play, 
and find a little thought giving place to a larger 
thought, a self-seeking thought yielding to a 
brother-seeking thought, it is the touch of the 
Lord God; and in the evening-time before they 
retire to rest they may take upon their lips the 
teacher’s words, and say, “We thank Thee, Lord, 
that we have felt Thy touch to-day.” The teach- 
ing would be elementary, but true, a revelation 
which the children would be able to bear. 


140 THE PERSISTENT INFLUENCE 


How may we know the touch of God in our 
feeling? Let us begin here. Our God hates all 
bitterness, and His unfaltering purpose is to change 
the bitter into the sweet. When He obtains an 
entrance into human life He finds many pools of 
bitterness, and His immediate work is to make 
them sweet. We so easily turn sour. Envy is a 
bitter pool. Jealousy is a bitter pool. Malice is 
a bitter pool. Irritableness is a bitter pool. When 
therefore the good Lord comes near to me He 
visits these pools of feeling, and by this sign may 
I know His touch. When malice changes into 
good-will, when envy is transformed into unselfish 
rejoicing, when irritableness becomes a cordial 
patience, when the waters sweeten, and vulgar 
passion of any kind is refined into exquisite love, 
we may know that the great God is at work in 
the wells of our being, and by all these evidences 
may we recognise His touch. May not these 
elements be taught to our children, so that they 
may be saved from an impotent vagueness, and 
may be enabled to offer the prayer, “May Thy 
presence be felt among us,” with an intelligent 
expectancy, which is itself the highest assurance 
of blessing. 

How may we know the touch of God in our 
wills? Let this be our beginning. The great 


OF FIRST IDEAS 141 


Lord reveals Himself as a “Spirit of power.” 
When therefore He comes into human life, He 
goes to the will, so ready to shrink and to shirk 
when confronted by unwelcome tasks, and He 
recharges and reinforces it from the dynamic of 
His own presence, and transforms an impotent 
isolation into the might of an unconquerable 
fellowship. This is how we may know His touch, 
and this is the truth we can teach to our children. 
When the sense of weakness yields to the sense 
of power, and when in the presence of duty “I 
can’t” gives place to “I can,” and “I can” ripens 
into “I will,” we may be assured it is the touch 
of the Lord. By these signs may our children be 
taught to recognise the presence of the Eternal, 
and for these may they devoutly kneel in the 
evening-time, and take these words upon their 
lips in praise, “We thank Thee, Lord, that we 
have felt Thy touch to-day.” 

I have thus ventured to elaborate my suggestion 
in some detail in order that I may make perfectly 
clear the lines along which I think our earliest 
teaching should proceed. We must teach not 
only what God is; we must teach that He draws 
near to us, and we must offer some explanation 
as to the modes of His approach. We must 
teach our children how to recognise the presence 


142 THE PERSISTENT INFLUENCE 


of the Eternal, that they may know the coming of 
the Son of God, and may “love His appearing.” 

These are not matters of unessential and 
transient import. They are primary, elemental, 
necessary, and once learnt they will never need to 
be unlearnt. They are seeds of truth which can 
be sown in the child-life with the confident hope 
of a bountiful harvest. They are alphabetic 
teachings which can be given to the immature 
mind as the beginnings of a knowledge high and 
broad and deep as heaven. Other things can 
wait. Larger things may be reserved for riper 
years. But these things, taught even to the 
youngest, will reveal the Lord God as a near and 
present reality, and make His communion with 
His children the companionship of a very blessed 
friend. 

Here, then, my fellow-workers in the Lord, is 
the counsel I would leave with you. Give to 
your children only such revelations as they can 
bear. Apportion the weight to their carrying 
power. Keep back the doctrine which is at 
present immaterial and remote. Let the elements 
you teach be absolutely true, such as shall last, 
without need of withdrawal, throughout the years. 
Ke prayerfully watchful in imparting the first 
conceptions of God, and teach the young minds 


OF FIRST IDEAS 143 


how to discern the movements of His Spirit. 
Lead on gently. Let the light be increased with 
the increasing strength of the eyes, and some day, 
in the great unveiling, yours shall be the unspeak- 
able joy of knowing that your little ones have 
grown so strong in vision as to be able to gaze 
upon the enveiled face of the King, upon the 
’ andimmed brightness of the Eternal Glory. 


XI 


THE MIRAGE AND THE POOL 


‘©The mirage shall become a pool.”—ISAIAH xxxv. 7. 


“THE mirage shall become a pool.” The illusory 
shall become the substantial. “The mirage ”—a 
beautiful, airy nothing—shall become a “pool,” a 
gracious and refreshing possession. The life of 
disappointments shall become a life of satisfaction. 
Such appears to me to be the spiritual import of 
the figure. Let us try to get the figure itself 
before our minds in sharp and impressive outlines. 
In a book of travels, entitled A Journey Overland 
to India, 1 find the following description of a 
mirage which occurred between Palestine and the 
Euphrates: “About noon the most perfect de- 
ception that can be conceived exhilarated our. 
spirits and promised an early resting-place. We 
had observed a slight mirage two or three times 
before, but this day it surpassed all I had even 
fancied. Although aware that these appearances 


THE MIRAGE AND THE POOL 145 


have often led people astray, I could not bring 
myself to believe that this was unreal. The Arabs 
were doubtful, and said that, as we had found 
water yesterday, it was not improbable we should 
find some to-day. The seeming lake was broken 
in several parts by little islands of sand, which 
gave strength to the delusion. The dromedaries 
of the sheikhs (who were much in advance) at 
length reached its borders, and appeared to us to 
have commenced to ford. . . . I thought they had 
got into deep water, and moved with greater 
caution. Their figures were reflected in the water. 
So convinced was one of our party of its reality, 
that he dismounted and walked towards the 
deepest part of it. He followed the deceitful lake 
for a long time, pursuing it farther and farther, 
and to our sight was strolling along its banks.” 
It was only the hot and sandy desert plain! 
Such is the mirage, sometimes mocking the 
thirsty, heat-stricken traveller with the promise 
of abundant waters; at other times filling the 
prospect with gigantic exaggerations, making 
commonplace tufts appear as magnificent trees, 
and presenting blades of grass as the menac- 
ing front of a mighty jungle. Such is the 
mirage of the desert: an illusory phantom, an 


inapprehensible bewitchment, the mockery of 
L 


146 THE MIRAGE AND THE POOL 


unredeemed promise, the genius of disappointment 
and chagrin. 

And now I am told that what some men have 
experienced in the sandy desert others have 
suffered in the common life. Humanity is mocked 
by a mirage more inviting and enticing than the 
semblance of the desert. There is the illusory in 
life, the mirage which allures with its promise 
of satisfying pools, and then mocks us with its 
leagues of desolating sand. The world abounds 
in the mirage. I labour for a competency, and 
the competency shapes itself to my longing eyes 
as a vision of “sweet security,” in which “no evil 
shall befall me, neither shall any plague come 
nigh my dwelling.” I reach the competency, 
but I do not attain the security! My environ- 
ment is still the sandy waste. The citadel I 
foresaw was only the creation of vapour: it was 
“a castle in the air” ; it was a mirage, the smiling, 
mocking face of the disappointing world. 

Here I am, toiling and moiling, with body and 
mind on the rack from the dawn to the sunset, 
weary and perspiring, feverish and faint. But 
hearten, my soul! A little while, a tiny span of 
years, a few more steps across the burning sands, 
and then—retirement! I see the green pastures 
and the still waters. Just across the sands there 


THE MIRAGE AND THE POOL 147 


shines a pool; and the heart plucks up, and the 
body toils on, and the sands are crossed, and I 
leave the burdensome caravan for my season of 
retirement. But where are the “still waters” and 
the “green pastures”? Where can the tired heart 
find rest in perfect peace? The “still waters” I 
saw in the dreary distance are only the creation 
of the vapour of the air. The “green pastures” 
are only the dry and innutrient grass of the 
desert, which I saw beautified though the deceptive 
haze of the years. It is the illusory in life. It is 
the mirage of the world. I anticipated a pool; 
I found the continuance of the sand. 

This mirage of disappointment, what multi- 
tudes it makes its victims! You can hear the 
wail of the disillusioned on every hand. Men 
and women are hurrying forward to the pools; 
and when you meet them again, you can tell by 
their hard and unillumined countenances that 
they have discovered the face of the mocker, and 
their soul is chilled to the core. There is nothing 
more tragical than to be in the presence of a man 
whose eyes have just been opened in disillusion- 
ment. The heart sinks, and as it sinks it draws 
the hope out of the face, just as the light is sucked 
out of the sky when the sun goes down. Here is 
one of the disillusioned! “The eye is not satisfied 


148 THE MIRAGE AND THE POOL 


with seeing!” He had thought it might be. It 
was only a mirage! “The eye is not satisfied 

. with seeing.’ Nature and art can never 
provide a pool in which the aspiring thirsts of the 
soul will be quenched. “The ear is not filled 
with hearing.” He had thought it might be, so 
he followed in pursuit. He feasted his ears with 
ravishing music and exquisite song. But the 
angel of satisfaction never came to his spirit. 
“The ear is not filled wth hearing.” Music 
cannot provide the satisfaction which will steep 
the soul in a fruitful peace. It is only a mirage, 
and creates ultimate disappointment in the secret 
depths of the life. The mocked and dissatisfied 
seeker wandered hither and thither over the wide 
spreading desert wherever the inviting pools 
allured. “I said, Go to, 1 will prove thee with 
mirth ; therefore enjoy pleasure: and, behold, this 
also was vanity. I made me great works; I 
builded me houses; I planted me vineyards; I 
made me gardens and paths, and I planted trees 
in them of all kinds of fruit: I gat me men singers 
and women singers. . . . Whatsoever mine eyes 
desired I kept not from them.” Surely this man 
found the pools! No; he only discovered the 
mirage. His verdict remained the same. He 
dropped from disappointment into profounder 


THE MIRAGE AND THE POOL 149 


disappointment, from chagrin to chagrin intensified. 
“Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” 
Disappointments abound: is it possible for us 
to attain to satisfaction? Is it possible to get 
away from semblance to realities? Can life 
become satisfying, and not a cruel procession of 
bitter chagrins? There is something quietly 
suggestive in the fact that in the Old Testament 
the word “vanity” is found over a hundred times, 
while in the New Testament I think you will find 
it only thrice. In the New Testament life is 
more satisfying, and the word “vanity” is rarely 
found. Men have come into closer union with 
God, and we never find reality until we have 
entered into fellowship with God. A disappointing 
life means an undiscovered God. Yes, the un- 
satisfied means the undiscovered! The world 
presents the mirage: God offers the pool! “The 
mirage shall become a pool.” The life of dis- 
appointments shall become the life of satisfaction. 
“Castles in the air” shall become “cities that 
hath foundations.” Thou shalt no longer spend 
thyself in striving for satisfying treasure only 
to find that it is but a phantom wealth. Poor 
heart, thou shalt no longer be mocked! Life 
shall have its grand satisfactions. “Shadows 
shall flee away.” Thou shalt deal with sub- 


150 THE MIRAGE AND THE POOL 


stances. In place of the mirage God shall give 
thee a pool. 

Now, it is a heartening thing for the preacher 
to be able to say to himself and to his hearers 
that these pools of God have been found. Weary 
pilgrims, fellow-pilgrims with ourselves, who have 
trudged the same weary ways over the shadow- 
less, burning sands, have found the pools, and 
have sung about them, and have left the story of 
their discovery in cheery gospels of grace. Some 
of the pools have been named, and their very 
names are full of soft and cool refreshment. Here 
is one of the pools of the Lord, around which the 
pilgrims are gathered. What is its name? The 
“wells of salvation”! Can you think of a more 
heartening word for the pilgrims of the desert 
sands? “With joy shall ye draw water out of 
the wells of salvation!” The “wells of salvation.” 
The wells of Zealth! They are medicinal waters, 
famed for the removal of heart-sickness, faintness, 
weariness of spirit! “ Wells of health,” purposed 
to annihilate any germs of moral disease which 
may have settled upon mind or heart, and to 
cleanse the spirit from all uncleanness. Their 
mission is not only to purify, but to strengthen 
and confirm. The “wells of health” are not 
only restoratives, but tonics, to put iron into the 


THE MIRAGE AND THE POOL I51 


blood, to nerve the will, and to impart force and 
freshness to the conscience. I think this must 
have been the pool which John Bunyan puts at 
the foot of the hill Difficulty, to refresh the 
pilgrim» after the exhausting monotony of the 
plain, and to reinforce him for the exacting climb 
which confronts him. “ With joy shall ye draw 
water out of the wells of salvation.” That is one 
of the pools of the Lord, and whosoever hastens 
towards its allurements will not be mocked by 
the disappointing sands. The world presents a 
mirage: God offers a pool. “God is faithful.” 
“Tn Him is no lie.” 

But here is another band of pilgrims gathered 
round about another of the waters of the Lord. 
What: do they call it? “The river of God’s 
pleasures.” In the desert? Yes, in the desert: 
“the thirsty land shall become springs of water.” 
What is the refreshment of the pilgrims? “God’s 
pleasures.” Aye, and the real import is even 
sweeter than the phrase conveys, for its inner 
meaning bears this suggestion, “God's delicacies.” 
Ask the question again, What are these desert 
pilgrims drinking as they gather about the pool? 
“ God’s delicacies.” They are drinking into their 
spirits the most delicate essences in life, the finest 
flavours, the most subtle and exquisite sensations, 


152 THE MIRAGE AND THE POOL 


“God’s delicacies!” The pilgrims appear to lack 
the multitudinous and riotous revelries of life ; 
but they have its finest distillations of joy. It is 
not always the man who owns the countryside 
who owns the landscape. He owns the estate; 
his almost penniless cottager, with the refined 
and purified spirit, owns the glory of the land- 
scape. Which of them drinks of the river of 
“God’s delicacies”? One man owns miles of 
costly exotics, and masses them for show in 
multitudinous congregation; another man does 
not own a single costly flower, but to him “the 
meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that 
do lie too deep for tears.” Which of them has 
the finer perfumes? Which of them drinks of 
“God’s delicacies”? Aye, but deeper and more 
subtle still are some of the delicacies of the Lord, 
“the things which God hath prepared for them 
that love Him.” The “natural man receiveth not 
the things of the Spirit.” They are delicacies 
which he can neither appreciate nor apprehend, 


The hill of Zion yields 
A thousand sacred sweets, 
Before we reach the heavenly fields, 
Or walk the golden streets. 


The world, too, offers its pleasures; but for 


THE MIRAGE AND THE POOL 153 


the spirit they are coarse and dissatisfying. The 
enticing pleasures of the world are for the soul a 
disappointing mirage. The world offers happi- 
ness: God gives joy. The mirage becomes a 
pool. 

Here is yet another band of desert pilgrims 
gathered round about the refreshing waters of 
the Lord. They call it “the river of peace.” 
The pilgrims are sitting in “memory’s sunlit air,” 
and their souls are possessed by a heaven-born 
peace. The world offers the pilgrim peace; but 
how is the gift bestowed? In giving peace the 
world attempts to shut two doors—the door of 
the past and the door of the future. It seeks to 
stifle memory and to put anticipation to sleep. 
When the Lord gives peace, He throws both 
doors wide open. He opens the door of memory, 
and converts the remembrance of yesterday’s sin 
into a sense of sweet forgiveness. He opens the 
door of anticipation, and converts the fear of 
to-morrow into a radiant and alluring hope. 
These pilgrims, gathered about the waters of 
peace, gaze back into their yesterdays, and sing, 
“Goodness and mercy hath followed me”; and 
they gaze into futurity with the further strain 
upon their lips, “I shall dwell in the house of 
the Lord for ever.” The world offers peace, 


154 THE MIRAGE AND THE POOL 


but it is the peace of benumbment, a mirage 
which mocks the soul. In place of the mirage 
God offers the pool of perfect and satisfying 
peace. 

What is the testimony of the pilgrims who 
have been to the Lord’s pools? Shall we listen 
to their story?- Here is a strain from the pil- 
grim’s song: “My soul is satisfied as with 
marrow.” The weary pilgrim has been feasting 
upon marrow, upon the superlatives and the ex- 
cellences of life. That is the way of the Lord. 
He leads His people among the excellences. He 
gives them “the finest of the wheat,” and His 
command is always for the highest: “ Bring forth 
the dest robe.” Here is another pilgrim witness: 
“He satisfieth the longing soul.” That is the 
testimony of an eager heart; for the “longing 
soul” is the soul which has been seeking greedily, 
like a wild beast hungeringly hunting for his 
food. He has been possessed by an aching 
hunger and thirst, and his testimony proclaims 
that in God his restless, aspiring soul is satisfied, 
Such are the stories of the desert pilgrims. 


Ten thousand, thousand are their tongues, 
But all their joys are one. 


We shall find satisfaction among the realities 


THE MIRAGE AND THE POOL 15s 


of the good Lord. Let us go to our God, and 
the enticing mirage shall mock us no more. We 
shall move, not amid the transient, but the 
eternal. Our faith will be justified. Our hope 
will be gratified. Our love will be satisfied. 


XII 


“CONCERNING THE COLLECTION”? 


**O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? 
The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law; 
but thanks be to God which giveth us the victory through 
our Lord Jesus Christ. . . . Now concerning the collection.” 
—1 CORINTHIANS xv. 55, xvi. I. 


ARE you conscious of a sudden and painful 
descent in the plane of the thought? Do you 
perceive a chilling change in the temperature? 
“O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where 
is thy victory? . . . Now concerning the collec- 
tion.” Is the association unworthy? Is the 
transition harsh and jarring? No such feeling 
of the incongruous possessed the consciousness 
of the Apostle Paul. He passed from one to 
the other without any perception of unwelcome 
change. The intrusion of a duty did not mar 
the heavenly music, but rather completed it. The 
apostle bore the sublime about in him, and so 


1 Preached at the inauguration of the Wesleyan Twenticth 
Century Fund. 


“CONCERNING THE COLLECTION” 157 


everything he touched was sublimed. “I bear 
about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus,” 
and everything derived its significance from the 
quickening light of that transcendent sacrifice. 
“Thanks be unto God, who has given us the 
victory through our Lord Jesus Christ . . . Now 
concerning the collection.” The tiniest bit of 
broken glass, lying in the rudest highway, can 
reflect the radiant splendour of the infinite sky, 
and every fragment of earth’s commonest day 
may become a heavenly constellation, owned by 
the “ Father of lights,” with whom is no variable- 
ness, neither shadow of turning. 

“QO death, where is thy sting? O grave, 
where is thy victory? . . . Now concerning the 
collection.” Let us rid ourselves of the sense of 
the incongruous. It feels like passing from 
bracing mountain-heights to sweltering vales. 
Say, rather, it is like passing from the springs to 
the river, from the vast gathering-grounds to the 
rich and bountiful stream. The fifteenth chapter 
of the Epistle to the Corinthians is the country 
of the springs; the sixteenth opens with a 
glimpse of the river. The fifteenth is the country 
of the truth, fundamental Christian truth, in 
which out personal hopes and triumphs have 
their birth ; with the opening of the sixteenth I 


158 “CONCERNING THE COLLECTION” 


catch a glimpse of the shining graces which are 
the happy issue of the truth. “O death, where | 
is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory ? 
Thanks be unto God, who giveth us the victory 
through our Lord Jesus Christ.” That is the 
land of the springs. “Now for the collection.” 
That is the beneficent river, 

Look away for a moment to the springs. The 
apostle is, joyfully recounting our hopes and 
triumphs in Christ. “OQ death, where is thy 
sting?” It is almost the laughing, mocking 
taunt of one who dare go quite near to the old 
terror without being afraid. .“O death, where is 
thy sting?” The once grim, black, frightful, 
affrighting terror has lost its only weapon. Death 
is now harmless as a stingless bee. To those in 
Christ death has no poison, only honey ; -its 
burden is sweetness rather than pain, “ O death, 
where is thy sting? QO grave, where is thy 
victory ?” .O grave, thou dark abyss, thou ever- 
open mouth, ever-swallowing, mever satisfied, 
always a victor, never a victim. | Never a victim? 
Christ is risen! _“O grave, where is its victory 2?” 
That is the place of the springs. “Christ, is 
risen!” Add to that. the firm, clear, heartening 
trumpet-note of the Gospel: “He that, believeth 
in Me shall never die,” he shall never feel death’s 


“CONCERNING THE COLLECTION” 159 


sting ; there shall be no poison in its touch ; his 
passing shall be a light sleep, not a hop<less 
‘servitude. There shall be no sense of separation, 
no outer darkness ; the hour of death shall be the 
hour of transition into the calm light of eternal 
day. “He that believeth in Me shall never 
taste death!” That is the land of the springs! 
Now, let me repeat the statement that we may 
the more clearly mark the issues. Christ dies, 
and by His death sucks the poison out of death. 
Death becomes stingless in Christ. He hurls 
back the gates of the grave, and emerges incor- 
ruptible and undefiled, converting the closed tomb 
into an open thoroughfare. The emancipation is 
not exclusive. Christ has established for every 
man a right-of-way into the peace and blessedness 
of the eternities. The angel with the flaming 
sword has been removed from the east of the 
garden. I may lift my tearful eyes in hope, and 
gaze along the “living way” into the prepared 
palace of the ageless life. And what is the 
import of this? It means that the possibilities 
of the individual life have been raised to the 
powers of the infinite. The impenetrable walls 
have been broken down. I have received an 
illimitable enlargement of sphere. I have been 
lifted out of narrowness and impoverishment. I 


160 ‘CONCERNING THE COLLECTION ” 


am no longer “cribbed, cabined, and confined.” 
MY feet are set in a land of broad spaces. I can 
behold the land that is very far off. That is the 
glorious burden of chapter xv., the emancipation 
and enlargement of life in the risen Christ. Now 
sec the beautiful succession, taking its rise in the 
last verse of chapter xv., and emerging clearly into 
vicw in the first verse of chapter xvi. The larger 
life is succeeded, say rather accompanied, by larger 
living. More gathering-ground, more springs, 
more resources—a larger view! More income— 
more expenditure! “Wherefore,” says the apostle, 
if these things are so,—death stingless, grave crown- 
less, life and immortality brought to light—“ be ye 
steadfast, unmovable,” let your walk be charac- 
terised by strength and firmness and confidence 

don’t be shaken into timid uncertainties by ever 

little whiff of hostile speech: “be ye steadfast an 

unmovable ”—“ always abounding in work,” you 

cup running over in rich and gracious ministry 
Having larger life, now largely live! “If ye 
salute your brethren only, what do ye more than 
others?” The vaster ground must produce a 
more copious volume of service. The grander 
faith must be creative of a richer beneficence. 
The larger hope must generate a nobler senti- 
ment. Christianity emerges and expresses itself in 


“CONCERNING THE COLLECTION” 163 


a passionate enthusiasm for humanity. “ Thanks 
be unto God, which giveth us the victory... . 
Now for the collection.” 

What was the occasion of this collection? 
There was a large body of poor Jews in Jeru- 
salem who had eagerly received the Christ of 
God. Their hearts were as dry as a blasted 
heath, and they panted for the water of life. 
They found the refreshment they sought in Jesus 
the Christ. They turned to Him, and offered 
Him the homage of their minds and hearts. For 
this they were excommunicated, outlawed, banned. 
Because of their life they were denied a living, 
and they began to be in want. I don’t think we 
are able to form any adequate conception of the 
intense hatred and repulsion with which the Jews 
regard those whom they consider renegade members 
of their race. During my ministry in Newcastle 
it was my privilege to baptize a young Jew, who 
had been wooed by the beauty of the Christ into 
the warmer light of the Christian faith. At once 
the parental instinct seemed to be benumbed. 
His father and mother forsook him. He was 
turned adrift. He was regarded as a dog. He 
was denied his daily bread. These were precisely 
the conditions which prevailed in Jerusalem, only 


in Jerusalem the ban of excommunication almost 
M 


162 “CONCERNING THE COLLECTION ” 


annihilated the chances of earning one’s bread, 
and inevitably drove the outlaw into poverty 
and want. But Christianity fostered humanity ; 
faith evoked philanthropy ; and from their fellow- 
believers in wider fields there flowed a steady 
stream of beneficence to alleviate their distress. 
From Galatia, from Corinth, and from Rome there 
flowed the gracious river of brotherly sentiment, 
which makes glad the city of God. In all this 
there was something quite unique. It was a novelty 
in the history of the world. It was a bene- 
ficence that overflowed conventional boundaries. 
In earlier days there had been beneficence that 
was patriotic; now there arose beneficence that 
was humane. It was not the sympathy of Jew 
with Jew, or of Roman with Roman, or of Greek 
with Greek. The race-lines crossed. It was 
the sympathy of Roman with Jew, of Gentile with 
Jew, of man with man, and this I say was a 
stupendous novelty in the intercourse of men. 
“ Henceforth there was neither Jew nor Gentile.” 
The stern, hoary race-limits were quite submerged 
in the voluminous sentiment of philanthropy born 
of acommon faith in the redeeming Christ of God. 

Now see how this acted. There is nothing 
that so welds people together as a common senti- 
ment. A common passage through a common 


“CONCERNING THE COLLECTION LD 


grief has united many sundered hearts. It is not 
otherwise with the radiant sentiment of joy. I 
have known two sundered brothers united again 
at the wedding of a sister who was loved by both. 
A common object has ended many an isolation. 
Get people to have a common sentiment towards 
a common thing, and you have taken a very vital 
step towards a fruitful union. Let the Roman be 
beneficently disposed towards the outlawed Jew, 
let a similar sentiment possess the hearts of the 
Corinthians and the Galatians, and you may be 
sure that Roman, Corinthian, and Galatian will be 
cemented together in the bonds of a closer kin- 
ship. That is one of the most gracious ministries 
of the Christian religion. Let a man hold the 
essential virtues of the Christian faith —say rather, 
let him be held by them, let them possess him,— 
let the transcendent truth of this fifteenth chapter 
constitute his convictions and hopes, and from his 
life there will inevitably proceed a river of bene- 
ficent sentiment which will mingle with other 
gladsome streams, flowing from men of kindred 
faith, and they will become one in the common 
enthusiasm of humanity, as they are one in the 
common glory of a great redemption. The birth 
of Christianity was the birth of a new philan- 
thropy. 


164 “CONCERNING THE COLLECTION ” 


Now, it is this vital association that I desire 
to emphasise. Truth and activity are related as 
springs and rivers. If we want the one to be 
brimming, we must not ignore the other. Bene- 
ficence will soon become thin and scanty if it does 
not take its rise in the hills. Begin with chapter 
xvi., “Now concerning the collection,’ and the 
result will be a forced and chilling artifice. You 
begin without momentum, without the impulse 
of adequate constraint. Begin on the heights 
of chapter xv., and chapter xvi. will emerge with 
the sequence of inevitable result. This collection 
is related to the resurrection, and if we hide and 
minimise the truth of the resurrection, or regard 
it as obsolete or impertinent, our beneficence will 
only be a spasm, a transient emotion, and not the 
full and sustained volume of the river of water of 
life. That was the cardinal and all-determining 
weakness of Robert Elsmere. He erased chapter 
xv., and began with chapter xvi. He denied the 
resurrection, and all the spacious and heartening 
truths which gather about it; and out of the dry, 
vacuous heart of its negation sought to educe a 
river of benevolent energy for the permanent 
enrichment of the race. “Will a man leave the 
snow of Lebanon?” Will he really try to make 
rivers, and ignore the pure, creative heights across 


* CONCERNING THE COLLECTION” 165 


the snow-line? That is our inclination and 
temptation. We try to make rivers, when some- 
times in our lives there is no hill-country, no land 
of plentiful springs. “I will open rivers in high 
places!” and only when we have the “high 
places” in our life, the enthroned and sovereign 
truths of atonement and resurrection, and the 
sublime and awful prospect of an unveiled im- 
mortality, only then will our life be a land of 
springs, musical with the sound of many waters, 
flowing with gladsome rivers to cheer and refresh 
the children of men. 

This is the interpretation of the glory ot 
Methodism. Methodism is now a vast and 
complex organism, but the organism is not the 
life. Before there was any organisation there 
was ariver. The organisation was devised for the 
direction of the river, not for its creation. It had 
been created elsewhere. Organisation turned it 
here or there, just as we concentrate the volume 
of a stream and divert it to the particular service 
of the mill-wheel. Robert Elsmere hugged the 
delusion that the mill-wheel creates the water- 
power. It simply uses it. The drought is the 
truest interpretation of the function of the wheel. 
No; organisation is not creative; it is only 
directive of what already exists. Methodism 


166 “CONCERNING THE COLLECTION ”. 


began to organise when the river had begun to 
flow. Where was the river born? Forgive me 
if I remind you of a classical passage of which 
indeed you need no reminder, words which con- 
stitute a comparative commonplace, but which I 
trust will never lose their inspiring glory. You — 
want to know the birthplace of your river? Here 
itis. “In the evening I went very unwillingly 
to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was 
reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the 
Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he 
was describing the change which God works in 
the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart 
strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, 
Christ alone, for salvation, and 2:1 assurance was 
given me that He had taken away my sins, even 
mine, and saved me from the law of sin and 
death.” “I felt my heart strangely warmed!” 
“T felt. I did trust in Christ!” That is 
where the river of Methodist beneficence and 
ministry was born! “He that believeth on Me, 
out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water!” 
Methodism was born when John Wesley’s’ heart 
was “strangely warmed,” warmed while he be- 
lieved and appropriated the saving efficacy of a 
Saviour’s death and resurrection. His heart was 
“strangely warmed”; genial currents, that had 


“CONCERNING THE COLLECTION” 167 


been frozen, were thawed and unloosed, and the 
waters of life began to flow in quickening and 
beneficent ministry. 

The truth which created Methodism is the 
truth by which it is to be sustained. Methodism 
can never become independent of the “word of 
truth” by which it was begotten. The gospel 
that kindled your fire provides the fuel for its 
maintenance. We need the truth that warms the 
heart. Let the heart of Methodism grow cold, 
and its river will soon be frozen. The evangelical 
revival was just a “strange warming” of the 
nation’s heart, and you know how the heightened 
spiritual enthusiasm let loose redeeming energies 
which had been locked in icy bondage. How 
varied and voluminous were the rivers of bene- 
ficence which began to flow from the enthused 
and awakened heart! John Howard, who “lived 
the life of an apostle and died the death of a 
martyr,’ began “to dive into the depths of 
dungeons, to plunge into the infections of 
hospitals, to survey the mansions of sorrow and 
pain, to gauge the dimensions of misery, depres- 
sion, and contempt; to remember the forgotten, 
to attend the neglected, to visit the forsaken, and 
to compare and collate the distresses of all men 
in all countries.” Robert Raikes had his eyes 


168 “CONCERNING THE COLLECTION ” 


opened to the existence of multitudes of depraved 
and ignorant children, spending the Sabbath in 
cursing and swearing, in noise and in riot; and 
he conceived the possibility of gathering them 
under kindly influences, and refining them into 
the apprehension of a sweeter and larger life. 
Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharp, and William 
Wilberforce heard the lone cry of the slaves as 
they suffered under the English flag ; and stung 
with a sense of shame, they laboured long, and 
laboured triumphantly, to remove this great blot 
on the character of the British nation, and to 
mitigate one of the greatest evils that ever 
afflicted the human race. William Carey’s 
“strangely warmed heart” was burdened with 
the irresistible vision of the benighted myriads 
of India, and he gathered about him kindred 
hearts, and led them to the glorious task of the 
evangelisation of that stupendous empire. Now 
mark the succession and suggestiveness of these 
remarkable dates. John Wesley began his ministry 
in 1726. He laboured for sixty-five years, and 
died in 1791. In 1792 the Baptist Missionary 
Society was founded; 1795 witnessed the establish- 
ment of the London Missionary Society; four 
years later, in 1799, saw the birth of the Church 
Missionary Society; five years later the Bible 


“CONCERNING THE COLLECTION” 169 


Society was founded,—and “their lines are gone 
out through all the earth, and their words to 
the end of the world.” Is the conjunction of the 
evangelical revival and this vast brimming river 
of beneficent energy a mere coincidence, or does 
it suggest a vital and enduring relationship? 
The river flowed out not only to relieve the 
gaping wants on distant shores; it flowed in 
healing ministry round about the sores and needs 
of our own land. “Everything shall live,” says 
the prophet Ezekiel, “whither the river cometh.” 
Most of our great hospitals were built when the 
nation’s heart had been “strangely warmed.” The 
great energising truths of this fifteenth chapter 
of Corinthians had been proclaimed, appropriated, 
believed, and in the belief there had been begotten 
an eager disposition of benevolence which sought 
the well-being and redemption of the race, 

I therefore count it my function to thus remind 
you of your birthday and of its significance for our 
own time. If you wish the river of your bene- 
ficence to be brimming, keep near the saving truth. 
By all means multiply your channels, broaden 
and extend them, but keep open your resources, 
If you “lengthen your cords,” take care to 
“strengthen your stakes.” Keep your heart 
warm, and your hand will remain kindly. | 


170 “CONCERNING THE COLLECTION ” 


would set your affections upon the things above, 
Christ died for you. He rose again. He is now 
enthroned in glory. Every hope that is worth 
cherishing centres in Him. Every glory that is 
worth possessing proceeds from Him. The purity 
of your soul, the sweetness of your home and 
the hope of its permanency, the ennobled fellow- 
ship of the race, the glorious expectancy of a life 
incorruptible and undefiled, all are ours in “ Christ 
Jesus our Lord.” . . . “ Lord, lift up our eyes unto 
the hills, from whence cometh our help.” “Lord, 
increase our faith.” “Worthy is the Lamb that 
was slain.” “Lord, we believe; help thou our 
unbelief.” 


XII 


“HE DIED FOR ALL” 


2 CORINTHIANS v. I5. 


“ CHRIST died for the ungodly.” Yes, but what 
is meant by “to die”? The question suggests no 
fanciful inquiry, the pursuit of which will lead us 
into merely fruitless speculations. The question 
is of deep, practical, immediate, personal import. 
The word “death” is a cardinal word in the 
New Testament Scriptures. It enshrines a 
primary fact, out of which a great gospel is 
born. “I delivered unto you first of all... 
How that Christ died for our sins,” “First of 
all” The fact takes first rank. It is all- 
determinative of our message. It must have 
priority and precedence over all other procla- 
mations. All other proclamations must find 
their significance in this. This is the creative 
fact, primary and fundamental. “First of all, 


172 “HE DIED FOR ALL” 


. . . Christ died for our sins.” “Christ died for 
the ungodly.” But what is meant by “to die”? 
We must have some large and worthy interpreta- 
tion of the imperial fact if we would worthily 
appreciate the work of our Lord. Have we a 
sufficiently profound and pregnant interpretation 
of death? What is the prevalent interpretation ? 
Our conception is too commonly narrow and im- 
poverished. Our emphasis is false, and false 
emphasis always means distorted truth. The 
body is too obtrusive in determining our spiritual 
judgments. It constitutes the Alpha and the 
Omega of much of our thought. It defines and 
limits our outlook. Take the first hundred 
people you meet, and confront them with the 
inquiry—What is life? and half the hundred 
will immediately think of the body. Vary your 
inquiry, and launch the question—What is death ? 
and the thought of the ninety and nine will im- 
mediately gather round about a body, a coffin, 
a graveyard. It is this dominance of the body, 
this intrusion of the body into all our conceptions, 
which impoverishes our comprehension of truth, 
and robs life of its heights and depths and far 
horizons. 

Now, our Lord repeatedly proclaimed that the 
bodily aspects of things are not primary, but 


~~ 


“HE DIED FOR ALL” 173 


secondary, and that the way into the Kingdom of 
Truth is by a scrupulous observance of this divine 
order. No man rightly interprets his daily bread 
to whom its primary aspect is its relationship to 
the flesh. “Seek ye first” the spiritual aspects of 
common bread. Let it become to you a sacra- 
ment, and let its cardinal significance be its ex- 
pression of the unseen and eternal. Let the body 
be subordinate and secondary, even in your inter- 
pretation of daily bread. That is the divine 
principle, the principle of succession in all 
ennobling and healthy thinking, and it seeks 
application in all the urgent affairs both of life 
and of death. 

“Of death?” Yes; we misinterpret death if 
we allow the body to determine our thought. If 
we are to pursue the fruitful way of the divine 
order in our gropings round about this mystery 
of death, our first step must be to place this 
clamorous flesh in the rear. Death is not 
primarily, but only very secondarily, an affair of 
the flesh. This is our Master’s teaching. Our 
investigations must find their starting-point here. 
The making of other starting-points has betrayed 
us into judgments which, I believe, have taken us 
far away from the Masters mind. You must 
have repeatedly noticed that what we ordinarily 


174 “HE DIED FOR ALL” 


call death, our Master insisted upon calling sleep. 
When the bodily activities cease, we describe the 
cessation as death. Jesus described it as sleep, 
holding the word “death” in reserve. You will 
remember that when He came to the ruler’s house, 
and one gave Him the intelligence that the little 
daughter was dead, the Master, even in the pre- 
sence of the hired mourners, and surrounded by 
the trappings and wrappages of woe, made the 
surprising declaration, “The maid is not dead, 
but sleepeth.” “And they laughed Him to 
scorn,” so glaring was the apparent conflict 
between the declaration and the stern reality. 
“Not dead”; cessation of this kind does not 
constitute death; it is only sleep. The word 
“death” must be held in abeyance to express 
an experience of infinite and appalling signi- 
ficance. 

You will remember, too, from that beautiful 
story which enshrines our Saviour’s love for the 
family at Bethany, that when He heard of the 
black terror which had invaded their home, He 
used the same mild and gentle-toned expression, 
“Our friend Lazarus sleepeth” ; and it was only 
because of the exigencies of the moment, and 
because of the practical bewilderment of the 
disciples, only because of their infantile grasp, 


“HE DIED FOR ALL” 175 


and their inability to reach and grip the larger 
thought, that our Master, with a sigh that one 
can feel through the straining speech, con- 
descended to their limitations, and using their 
own abused word confessed “ Lazarus is dead.” 

Here, then, is a suggestive indication of the 
Master’s mind. What too often constitutes our 
entire conception of death scarcely entered into 
Christ’s conception at all. What we called death, 
Christ named sleep. The word death must be 
kept in the rear to suggest some other experience 
of awful and unspeakable import. 

Now, let us advance a farther step. The 
Master repeatedly declares that He came to save 
us from that which He calls death. “Ifa man 
keep My word, he shall never see death.” Insert 
the common interpretation of the word death in 
that phrase, and the sentence ‘becomes a dark 
confusion. “If a man keep My word, he shall 
never see death.” But the saintliest among us, 
they who have lived and walked upon the serene 
mountain heights, hand in hand with God, become 
worn in body, and grow weary, and cease, and we 
have to carry their remains over the same well- 
trodden way to the cemetery, along which we 
carry the remains of the lustful, the avaricious, 
and the proud. Yes, we have to dig graves 


176 “HE DIED FOR ALL” 


even for saints. Do they then die? Nay, nay, 
they only sleep, for “if a man keep My word, he 
shall never see death.” They sleep; yes, but they 
cannot die ! 

Listen again to the Master: “ This is the 
bread which cometh down out of Heaven, that 
a man may eat thereof and not die.” But men 
and women do eat that bread. They make 
it their daily food, and yet they may be way- 
worn invalids, toilsomely dragging along in 
wearying infirmity, and long before they reach 
the limit of threescore years and ten they fall by 
the way, and we have to lay their worn-out bodies 
beneath the soil. They fed on Heaven’s bread ; 
do they die? Nay, nay, they only sleep. “Ifa 
man eat of this bread, he shall never die.” They 
sleep ; yes, but they cannot die! 

Let me give you one other of the Master’s 
words. “He that heareth My word, and believeth 
on Him that sent Me .. . is passed from death 
unto life.” “Is passed.” The great transition 
is effected. He is alive for evermore. But men 
and women do hear His word, and they do fix 
their belief on the Father who sent Him, and yet 
they pass from physical strength through physical 
weariness to physical cessation. We hear their 
farewell. We draw our blinds. The mourners 


“HE DIED FOR ALL” 177 


go about the streets, and we devise little memento- 
cards, on which we inscribe the words, “ Died So- 
and-so!” “He that heareth My word and 
believeth is passed from death unto life.” “ Died 
So-and-so!” “If any man eat of this bread, he 
shall never die.” “Died So-and-so!” “Ifaman 
keep My saying, he shall never see death.” “ Died 
So-and-so!” We are clearly using the word with 
quite another interpretation from that given to it 
by Christ. It cannot be repeated too often, or 
emphasised too strongly, that what we call death 
is to Christ our Lord not death at all. It is only 
sleep, and He came not to save us from sleep, but 
to deliver us from death. We shall all sleep, 
saints and sinners alike ; but we shall not all die: 
for if any man keep the word of the Christ, he 
shall never see death; he is passed from death 
unto life; he abideth for ever. 

But my text tells me that “Christ died.” He 
did more than sleep; He died! What, then, was 
the Saviour’s death? What do we commonly 
mean when we speak of the death of Christ? We 
fix our eyes upon Calvary. We see the Cross. 
We see the crucified body. We see the quivering 
flesh. We see the dripping blood. We see the 
face-lines of unutterable woe. We see the last 


gasp, and we almost feel the appalling stillness 
N 


178 “HE DIED FOR ALL” 


which follows the appalling pain. And we call 
that the death of Christ. That physical cessation 
we call the death. What if Christ should call 
that part of the stupendous crisis His sleep? 
When the little maid was lying in a precisely similar 
condition respecting the flesh, Christ named the 
condition a sleep. When all the physical activities 
of Lazarus had ceased, Christ named the cessation 
asleep. May we reverently take the Master's own 
word “sleép,” and use it to name the physical 
cessatifs: on the Cross, and reserve the word 
death! ¢r something behind the physical cessation 
—something of untold and overwhelming horror? 
I think*that even on Calvary the body may be 
too obtriisive in our thoughts. We see the rude, 
rough cross-beams ; we see the hammers and the 
nails; we see the uplifted Saviour; and the 
vision is terrible and terrifying, and I pray that it 
may be burnt into our hearts in lines of fire. But 
on that awful Mount of Calvary we see the 
Saviour sleep; we do not, and we cannot, see 
Him die! But “Christ died.” If the physical 
cessation were sleep, what was the Saviour’s 
death? Since the crucifixion of the Master, 
hosts of His disciples have been similarly crucified, 
and have shared His bloody martyrdom. Like 
their Master, they slept; unlike their Master, they 


“HE DIED FOR ALL” 17¢ 


do not die. “Christ died.” What was the 
Saviour’s death? 

I would now lead you along a way that I 
almost fear to tread. One can divine by instinct 
so much more than he can put into speech. We 
can feel so much more than we can express 
And the way is very dim, with only here and 
there a guiding mark. Let us away into Gethi- 
semane, at the midnight, that we may just touch 
the awful mystery. The Master is there, and He 
has taken with Him His three most g>‘imate 
friends. They can accompany Him par of the 
way, and then He must leave them that He may 
continue the weird journey alone. Says the 
simple narrative, “He began to be sorrowful and 
very heavy.” I think that marks the beginning 
of the dying. He has not yet begun to sleep; I 
think He has begun to die. “Sorrowful and very 
heavy.” Just gaze into the hearts of these words, 
“Sorrowful” has a profounder content than the 
word appears to denote; it is significant of the 
grief of desolation; and as for the word translated 
“heavy,” it suggests an awful sense of homeless- 
ness. Shall we insert these words in place of 
those that have become almost too familiar to us? 
“He began to be desolate and very homeless.” 
Let us pause there. “Very homeless!” He who 


180 “HE DIED FOR ALL” 


only a few hours before had spoken so comfort- 
ably about His Fathers house with the many 
mansions, and who on the self-same day had 
joyfully proclaimed the unfailing presence and 
companionship of His Father—‘*I am not alone, 
my Father is with Me”—was now becoming 
burdened with the oppressive sense of homeless- 
ness. The Fathers house was becoming dim, 
and communion with the Father was waxing 
faint, and this sinless Son of God was beginning 
to feel the chills of a homeless desolation. I 
think that was the beginning of the dying. He 
was beginning to taste death ! 

Go a little farther into the garden, and listen 
to the Master’s agonised speech. “My soul is 
exceeding sorrowful, even unto death”; ex- 
ceeding desolate, “even unto death.” Desolation 
unto death! That is the wailing moan of the 
Saviour’s soul. Is He shrinking from the Cross? 
Is He afraid of the nails? Does He recoil from 
the physical pain? I remember keenly that one 
of the distresses which used to afflict the religious 
hope of my boyhood was a temptation, which I 
tried hard to resist, a temptation to suspect that 
Jesus was not so brave and fearless as some of 
His own followers, of whom I had read in my 
school-books. I had read how disciples of Jesus, 


“HE DIED FOR ALL” 181 


when the flames of martyrdom were rising and 
curling about them, had almost toyed and played 
with the flames, as little children play with the 
fringes of the advancing tide. I had read of how 
young girls had been tarred from crown to toe, 
and then fired to illumine a sensualist’s revels, 
and how they had sung in the flame. And did 
their Master shrink from that which they almost 
welcomed with a shout? “If it be possible, let 
this cup pass from Me.” “My soul is exceeding 
desolate.” Is he afraid of the Cross? Nay, nay, 
a thousand times nay; He fears not the sleep, 
but, oh, He does shrink from the death! Over 
His soul there is gathering and deepening a mid- 
night darkness and desolation to which no other 
name can be given but the name of death. He 
is tasting the exceeding bitterness of death. On 
now to Calvary, and let us hear the words in 
which the sense of desolation and homelessness 
deepens into an unspeakable and unthinkable 
intensity! “My God, My God, why hast Thou 
forsaken Me?” That was death. What would 
follow would be only sleep. That was death— 
appalling midnight in the soul, the horror of a 
great darkness, exceeding desolation, abandon- 
ment! That was death—the Father’s house 
obscured, the Father’s hand vanished, and the Son 


182 “HE DIED FOR ALL” 


of God in the outer darkness, in the agonies of a 
consuming loneliness! That was death — the 
sinless Saviour out there in the night, in the 
abandonment which is “the wages of sin.” What 
we call death, Christ called sleep. “Christ died.” 

Now, that homelessness of soul, that abandon- 
ment in the outer darkness, is “the wages of 
But “Christ knew no sin.” And so we 
are led to the music of the Gospel, which has 
brought cheer and assurance to a countless host, 
the Gospel that Christ Jesus walked that way of 
appalling darkness and alienation in place of His 
brethren. “Christ died for the ungodly.” He 
died for our sins. A few soldiers with hammer 


sin.” 


and nails put Him to sleep on the Cross, but it 
was for the sins of a race that He died, that He 
voluntarily went into the outer darkness, into the 
awful eclipse of forsakenness and abandonment. 
‘He tasted death for every man.” He drank 
that cup for the race. “He died for all.” 

Now, the Scriptures affirm that apart from 
Christ I am still under the dominion of “ the law 
of sin and death”; “sin and death,” sin and 
abandonment, sin and homelessness, sin and 
forsakenness and terrible night. That is an 
indissoluble connection, stern and inevitable. It 
is a law, fixed and unchanging, “the law of sin 


“HE DIED FOR ALL” 183 


and death.” But the Scriptures further affirm 
that in Christ Jesus I come under the dominion 
of another law—the “law of the spirit of life »— 
and by this I am freed from the sovereignty of 
“the law of sin and death.” Under “the law of 
the spirit of life,’ the lonely way of the outer 
darkness will never more be known, By Christ 
the way has once been trod, never to be re-trodden 
by those who are in Him. “There shall be no 
more death.” 

Let me now call up for review some of the 
Master’s glowing promises which I read to you at 
the beginning of my discourse, and let me read 
them in the light of the interpretation which I 
have been endeavouring to expound. “Ifa man 
keep My saying, he shall never see death.” He 
shall sleep, but he shall never know the outer 
darkness of separation and abandonment. “ This 
is the bread which cometh down out of Heaven, 
that a man may eat thereof and not die.” He 
shall sleep, but he shall never die. He shall 
never pass into the cold, chilling eclipse of a 
homeless desolation. We have been “reconciled 
to God by the death of Ilis Son,” and in that 
Son death is abolished. There is “life for ever- 
more.” 

Here, then, is the Glory of the Gospel. It is 


\ 


184 “HE DIED FOR ALL” 


declared that I, a poor struggling, self- wasted 
sinner, may by faith be so identified with Christ. 
that Christ and I become as “one man.” That 
is no ingenious phrase, the vehicle of a pious but 
fruitless fancy. It is the expression of a gospel, 
which a highly privileged ministry has the glory 
to proclaim, and which has proved itself to be 
the most august and blessed of realities to a 
great and uncounted host. An unspeakably 
fruitful identity with Christ, the mystic oneness 
of the believing race in the risen Lord! This is 
the possible heritage of all men, made possible to 
all men by the Saviour’s atoning death. “He 
that is joined unto the Lord is one spirit”; he 
is “bound in the bundle of life with the Lord 
his God.” He is a partner in the deathless or 
eternal life. 

But now to me, and to all men, there is com- 
mitted a great choice. I can choose to be one 
with Adam, or one with Christ ; one with the old 
man, or one with the new; one under “the law of 
sin and death,” or one under “ the law of the spirit 
of life.’ I say the choice is ours, and we know it. 
If I make this the choice of my days—one with 
Thee, Thou deathless Christ, by faith and by faith- 
fulness, one with Thee—I shall never die. But if 
my life be a deliberate affront to the deathless 


“HE DIED FOR ALL” 185 


Son of God, if I turn my back upon His grace, if 
this be the choice of my days—one with thee, 
thou man of sin, by obedience and by spirit with 
thee—then I shall die, nay, even now I am dead, 
and the great day of unveiling shall reveal to me 
the appalling fact that I am homeless, desolate, 
separated by a “ great gulf” from “the inheritance 
of the saints in light.” “These shall go into the 
outer darkness,” into the night of awful loneliness, 
into the eclipse of death. They shall die. 

Oh, pray that we may never know the death! 
When the hour of our departure comes, and the 
friends whom we leave behind shall speak of us as 
“dead,” I pray that the word may be a misnomer, 
a pardonable fiction, not expressive of the reality 
of things. I pray that we may only sleep. May 
the good Lord put us into a gentle sleep, and in 
the great awakening may we find ourselves not 
homeless, but at home, glad to be at home, glad 
to meet the deathless One, and to see Him face 
to face! 


XIV 


THE DAYSPRING 


“ The dayspring from on high hath visited us, to give light to them 
that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our 
feet into the way of peace.”-LUKE i. 78, 79. 


“ THEM that sit in darkness.” Let us lay hold of 
the intense and powerful figure. How beautiful 
and refreshing it is to sit in the twilight, the cool, 
clear, calm twilight, after the hard, oppressive glare 
of a perspiring summer day! How benumbing to 
sit in the darkness in the winter-time, with no 
genial companionable fire, and no cheery enliven- 
ing light! “Them that sit in darkness.” The 
figure is not suggestive of the twilight of a sum- 
mer’s eve, or the trembling expectant twilight of a 
summer’s morn; it is the midnight of the winter 
season. The darkness is cold, clammy, and chill- 
ing. It is burdensome and spectral, weird and 
prolific of fears, “Them that sit in darkness.” 


THE DAYSPRING 187 


Not the twilight that fosters fruitful meditation, 
but the darkness which is the parent of bewilder- 
ment. We all know the power of the darkness, 
How intense and feverish becomes the imagination 
in the still dark hours of the night! How erratic 
‘and untrustful our judgments! What easy victims 
of exaggeration! Some faint and almost insig- 
nificant sound is magnified into the prelude of a 
burglarious encounter. With exaggeration there 
goes misinterpretation. In the night-time every 
crack of the timber is the click of the enemy’s 
gun. The rustle of your own garments is the 
sweep of the enemy’s robe. The night season is 
the period of nervous intensity, of exaggeration, 
of misinterpretation, of many-faced and chilling 
superstitions. 

“Them that sit in darkness.” That was the 
condition of the race before the Saviour was born. 
The world was dark and clammy and cold. Life 
was full of chills, and therefore full of fevers. 
Faith was numb; the nerves were wakeful. 
Imagination was wild and andisciplined. The 
God that touched them through the darkness was 
conceived as a large-scaled and magnified man. 
“Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an 
one as thyself,” fickle, passionate, revengeful, 
morally uncertain, proud. Exaggeration reigned. 


188 THE DAYSPRING 


The natural became the ominous ; the momentary 
became the momentous. Life had lost its true 
proportions, and was fallen into false and perilous 
emphases. Pain was regarded as an enemy. 
Infirmity wore the features of a foe. Adversity 
was the malediction of an angry God. And still 
in the night there was a deeper midnight ; in the 
darkness was a grosser darkness still. Even in 
the blackness there was a shadow, a more awful 
pall, a chillier and more affrighting presence. 
“Them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of 
death.” What did death mean to these tenants 
of the night? It meant the dissolver of the body. 
It meant the jailor of the soul. It meant the 
cruel and irretrievable break-up of all the tender- 
est bonds. It meant a plunge into what they 
described as “the pit”; and “the pit” meant 
a huge and painful query, an appalling abyss 
whose outlines they could not discern. Death 
was the vehicle of poison, a presence whom 
they only knew as a “sting,” an agent of 
_ destruction, a “ victory,” an overbearing and 
overwhelming tyrant. This was the shadow 
in the darkness, the midnight in the night; 
they “sat in darkness and in the shadow of 
death.” 

If you want to know the explanation of much 


THE DAYSPRING 189 


of the darkness, you must turn to the first and 
second chapters of the Epistle to the Romans. 
The light that lighteth every man had flickered 
down into its socket. Rebellion against the light 
had turned their conscience into smoke, which 
broke only into infrequent light, as you have seen 
the smoke of your fireplace burst into occasional 
flame. “Their senseless heart was darkened.” In 
the night their affections became anemic. The 
beautiful, graceful, trailing sympathies of human 
life became cold and bloomless. Hope lost its 
power of wing, and all the coronal faculties of the 
life were oppressed and dwarfed in the circum- 
venting hindrances of the powers of darkness and 
night. 

Such was the darkness of the race prior to 
the first Christmas-time. “They sat in dark- 
ness and in the shadow of death.” ... “ Now, 
when Jesus was born in Bethlehem” . . . what? 
The morning dawned upon that night-burdened, 
shadow-haunted, fear-filled world. “The day- 
spring from on high hath visited us.” “The 
dayspring!” Could anything be more appro- 
priate to the fearful hearts of the tenants of night ? 
“The dayspring!” Not the full day, but the 
spring of the day, the light-fountain, Heaven’s 
East! Even the tenderest eyes can bear to look 


190 THE DAYSPRING 


at the dawn! How sore and distressing and 
bewildering it is, in the hours of darkness, to have 
flashed upon your eyes the harsh glare of the 
gaslight! We say, “Turn it down a little.” 
The little light is a better minister than the big 
one. “Turn it down a little until I have become 
accustomed to it.” That is the principle. “I 
have yet many things to say unto you, but ye 
cannot bear them now.” The children of night 
must march into the noontide through the softer 
splendours of the dawn. I wonder how the 
Eternal Son will visit these shadow-haunted 
regions of night. He might have come, attended 
by all His holy angels, wearing the imperial 
robes of ineffable glory, engirt with the super- 
natural splendours of the eternal day. “When 
Jesus was born in Bethlehem,” He dawned upon 
the world as a carpenter. He beamed upon the 
night-realms in the soft warm rays of a summer’s 
morn. He came as “the dayspring,” the open- 
ing fountain of the day, the first little spring 
which is to issue at last in the immeasurable 
glory of Eternal light and truth. We should 
only have been bewildered with an apocalypse 
of dazzling glory. We should have been “ blinded 
with excess of light.” So He dawned upon us; 
the light fell upon the sore and wearied hearts 


THE DAYSPRING Ig! 


of men with the soft warmth of an infant’s kiss 
“ Soft and quiet as the breast-feather of a motherly 
bird.” 

“The dayspring from on high hath vzsited 
us!” “Hath visited!” Another word which 
helps to heap up and multiply the comforting 
suggestion. “The dayspring hath visited us!” 
It is a relief-mission. There is another strain 
ringing in my ears which I will call to aid in the 
interpretation of this. “Pure religion and un- 
defiled before God and the Father is this, zo vzszt 
the fatherless and widows in their affliction.’ 
“To visit the fatherless and widows.” “ The day- 
spring from on high hath visited us,” It is a 
visit of sympathy, of healing, of relief, of release. 
Such is the infinitely gentle and delicate coming 
of the omnipotent God. I do not wonder that 
my text is heralded with the explanation that 
the beautiful and glorious mission was born in 
“the tender mercies of our God”! That is one 
of the phrases whose wonderful content we are 
not going to be able to appreciate until we stand 
in the heavenly places, and apprehend something 
of the stupendous powers and majestic glories of 
Immanuel’s land. Go into the village smithy, 
and see the swarthy smith at work, with mighty 
blows beating the reluctant iron to shape and 


192 THE DAYSPRING 


use. He looks the embodiment of exuberant 
power, and the “muscles of his brawny arms are 
strong as iron bands.” Now see him lay aside 
the hammer, and with those strong hands and 
arms, with which he smote the iron, see him lay 
hold of his frail little toddling child, and with 
infinite delicacy and tenderness lift her and 
hug her to his breast. The tenderness of the 
lifting is all the sweeter because of the massive 
strength of the man who lifts. Strength is the 
fountain of the fairest delicacy. The softest 
water is the water that has flowed over granite. 
And when “we reach the home of glory,” and 
our eyes are opened, and opened fearlessly upon 
the wonderful power and majesty of the King, 
we shall be able to enter more deeply into the 
apprehension of the “tender mercies of our 
God,” the sweet soft river of the water of life 
which flows out of the throne of God and the 
Lamb. 

What was the purpose of the dawning? “To 
give light to them that sat in darkness.” To 
illumine the world. “To guide our feet into the 
way of peace.” To redeem the world. “To give 
light.” The mission of the dayspring was the 
ministry of illumination. The purpose of the 
Incarnation was to go into the realms of shadow 


THE DAYSPRING 193 


and night to the poor victims of self-delusion, 
of exaggeration, of misinterpretation, of terror, 
and of superstition, and reveal to them the true 
shapes and proportions and colours of things. 
The Dayspring was not first of all a redeemer. 
He must first reveal before He can redeem. He 
must give light before He can give peace. He 
must show me things as they are, their very 
selves, bereft of all perversion. He must un- 
cover masks, remove glosses, strip away paint, 
and show me things as they are, in their essential 
and innermost reality. He must “give light.” 
He must show me the real shape and colour of 
sin. I must see my “secret sins in the light 
of His countenance.” He must “give light,” I 
must see life in true perspective. I must discern 
what are really hills and what are really valleys; 
what things I must regard as major and what 
I must regard as minor; what must be treated 
with gravity and what can be lightly skimmed. 
He must “give light.” I must see myself. I 
must see my brother. I must see my God. I 
must not be left to the impositions of the dark- 
ness, the sport of exaggeration and superstition. 
I am blinded with darkness! I want to see! 
“What wouldest thou that I should do unto 


thee?” “Lord, that I may receive my sight!” 
Oo 


194 THE DAYSPRING 


“The Dayspring from on high hath visited us, 
to give light to them that sit in darkness.” 

But not only as revealer did He come. As 
redeemer also did this Dayspring visit us. He 
reveals that He may redeem. He sets my secret 
sins in the light, that in the light they may be 
consumed. He “gives light” that He may guide 
our feet into the way of peace. He illumines 
the world and He redeems it. “To guide our 
feet into the way of peace.” That is not the 
guidance of a street-lamp. It is the guidance 
of a pioneer. It is not a lamp darting its rays 
along a supposed and hypothetical way. It is 
the pioneer himself making the way. Pioneers 
are “living ways.” Robert Morrison laid down 
his life in a long and laborious martyrdom in 
China, and he became a “living way” to guide 
our feet into the thought and need of the Chinese 
Empire. David Livingstone laid down his life 
in Africa, and became a “living way” to guide 
our feet into the heart of that dark continent. 
The pioneer is the living way into undiscovered 
realms. There was a land called “peace,” a 
land which the children of the shadow and the 
night were unable to find. We had heard of 
it, we had hungered for it, but we could never 
find the way. And he who was the Dayspring 


THE DAYSPRING 195 


became our pioneer ; and in ways ineffably exalted 
above the pioneers of transient time, He laid 
down His life for us, and’ became the “ living way ” 
through Whom we find the land and bliss of 
eternal peace, 


XV 


THE UNBELIEF OF THE FOOL 


*¢ The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.”—PSALMSs 
xiv. I. 


“THE fool hath said in his heart, There is no 
God.” That is what the fool said, but it is the 
way in which he said it that revealed him to be a 
fool. There are souls that just whisper to them- 
selves, “ There is no God,” and the secret utterance 
seems to chill their blood and fill them with be- 
numbing fear. Repeated calamity comes upon a 
man. . The floods are out. All his ways are 
broken up. The lines of his life are filled with 
perversity. Confusion reigns. He moves amid 
his desolation, himself confused and desolate, and 
now and again a thought sweeps across his heart 
with the chilling touch of a cold night - wind, 
“There is no God.” Is hea fool, the fool of the 
text? He is eagerly groping his way, as though 


THE UNBELIEF OF THE FOOL 197 


feeling for some longed-for presence, like a blind 
man reaching out for some tangible support, and 
he touches nothing. He sighs in his failure, and 
whispers, “There is no God.” But again he 
gropes; “Oh that I knew where I might find 
Him!” In his sorrow and calamity he is like a 
little child in the evening time, lost amid the 
multitudinous windings of some great city, inquir- 
ing his way home. He is feeling his way to God ; 
and if in the sense of a great vacancy his heart 
should fearingly say, “There is no God,” it 
deepens his sense of orphanage, and fills him with 
an aching loneliness and pain. No; that is not 
the man of my text. He is seeking, and “he 
that seeketh findeth,’ and shall at length find 
himself at home with God. 

Who, then, is this fool of the text? Let 
us read it again, and let us read between the 


lines. “The fool hath said” —now we must 
insert a shout of Satanic laughter —“ There is 
no God.” We miss the meaning of the words 


if we leave out the laugh. How much the laugh 
reveals! I am told that a band of soldiers 
bowed before the Saviour and said, “ Hail, King 
of the Jews.” It sounds like reverent worship: 
“Hail, King of the Jews.” But if we put the 
soldiers’ coarse laugh into the spoken words, they 


198 THE UNBELIEF OF THE FOOL 


are revealed as cruel and horrible blasphemy. 
And so with the words of my text. Into the 
fool’s words we must put the fool’s laugh. The 
fool said, “ There is no God,” and he said it with 
a laugh, a flippant laugh, a laugh that suggested 
a glad relief. Now, Scripture affirms that the 
man who can say, “There is mo God,” and say 
it jubilantly, with an air of welcome triumph, with 
a laugh, is a fool; and by fool is meant some- 
thing more than silly, unwise, or senseless. The 
word “fool” as used in the Scriptures is much 
more than a merely intellectual term denoting 
want of judgment. It is a moral term denoting 
lack of virtue. The fool of the Scriptures is a 
man who has fallen away, little by little, degree by 
degree, until he is a degraded man. Ai fool isa 
vile man, morally degenerate. Here, then, is the 
full force of my text—the man who says, with an 
air of laughing and self-satisfied triumph, “ There 
is no God,” is a vile man; at his heart there is 
moral rottenness ; he is a fool! 

There is, therefore, in addition to what we 
call honest unbelief, a laughing and bragging 
unbelief, which is born out of sin. If we track 
it to its root we shall find that it is the outcome, 
not of a sensitive and groping spirit, but of a 
violated conscience, a broken moral law. Its 


THE UNBELIEF OF THE FOOL 199 


source is vicious. Its root isimmoral. The man 
is a fool at his heart. Let us follow this for a 
moment. “The vile man hath said in his heart, 
There is no God.” Why does the vile man say, 
“There is no God”? Because that is what the 
vile man has wished to believe. The wish was 
“father to the thought.” In that familiar phrase 
we express a profound philosophy. Our wishing 
is the father of much of our thinking. Our 
desires colour and determine many of our judg- 
ments. I do not think we sufficiently consider 
the power and often the tyranny which our wishes 
exercise over our minds. We sometimes speak 
about an idle wish. Wishes are not always idle; 
perhaps they are never so. They play about 
our thoughts and influence them, leading them 
along particular lines to particular conclusions. 
That is an everyday occurrence. It is a very 
simple way along which we travel. I wish that 
a certain thing may happen. That wish will 
not travel alone. Let it continue, and it will 
drag the judgment after it. I shall come to ¢hink 
that the certain thing wz// happen. The wish may 
become an assumption. Ay, let the wish be 
strengthened and intensified, and I may come 
to judge that the certain thing as happened. 
The wish may become an assumption; the 


200 THE UNBELIEF OF THE FOOL 


assumption may become a conviction. A strong 
wish may influence me into thinking that a certain 
thing zs which is not! My judgment may be 
based not upon the fact of an occurrence, but 
upon the strength of my own wish. The wish is 
father to the thought. Here, then, is the fool of 
my text, who has come to think there is no God. 
He has wished it so long that he has come 
to think it. His wishes have determined his 
thoughts. But what has determined his wishes? 
His character. The nature of the man’s wishes 
is determined by the nature of his inner life. 
Our wishes rise as naturally and as inevitably 
out of our being as sweet fragrance exhales from 
a rose, and a noisome stench from a cesspool. A 
heart that is as a beautiful garden, filled with the 
flowers of the Spirit, will exhale wishes full of 
sweet and pleasant influence; but a heart that 
is only a moral cesspool will exhale wishes of 
vicious and poisonous stench. As we are, we 
wish; as we wish, we think; as we think, we 
judge. This man of the text had the cesspool 
in his heart. He was ungodly at the core. He 
began to wish there was no God; and at last, 
with impious hilarity and with a note of unholy 
triumph, “the fool said in his heart, There is 
no God.” Here, then, is the truth I wish to 


THE UNBELIEF OF THE FOOL _ 201 


emphasise, that the tendency of sin is to make 
for unbelief, and that much presumptuous scepti- 
cism may be traced to the violation of the moral 
law of God. 

Let us look at this a little more closely. Let 
us see how the principle operates on the plane of 
merely human relationship. Let me assume that 
J have deliberately done another man a serious 
personal injury. Well, what is my disposition in 
regard to him? It is not necessarily one of 
sotrow that I have wronged him. I may be far 
more concerned about my own feelings than 
about his. He lives in the same city, and it is 
very unpleasant for me to meet him. It would 
be a great relief to me if I heard he was about 
to leave the town and make his home elsewhere. 
I wonder how I should take it if some morning 
I were to be told that he was dead? Do you 
think it has ever happened that one man, who 
has injured another, has given a great sigh of 
relief when he heard that the injured one was 
dead? If that be so between man and man, 
when one has broken the moral law, is there any 
analogous relationship between rebellious man 
and the great God? If it could be authorita- 
tively announced to-day in this city that God was 
dead, do you think there is any man who would 


202 THE UNBELIEF OF THE FOOL 


give a great sigh of relief? Are there people in 
our midst who would be thankful to be rid of 
God, and who would be glad to be able to say, 
“There is no God”? That is how sin works. It 
creates a desire to be rid of God, a wish that 
there was no God, and the wish deceives us into 
the practical judgment that there is no God. A 
man rebels against his Maker. He violates the 
King’s law. What follows? He is pursued by 
a haunting sense of fear. In the quiet interludes 
of his life he is possessed by a vague uneasiness. 
Even the bold, bad man has his frights and his 
fears. What then? Those fears must be allayed. 
How? Laugh at them! Say they are childish 
fancies, illusory phantoms, churchyard ghosts! 
The evil man wishes that they were nothings. 
He comes to think they are nothings; and so he 
says they are nothings. That is the only way 
for the persistently bad man. The only way 
by which he can escape the fear of God is to 
say, “There is no God”; and to this impious 
conclusion he is driven by the terrible force of 
his own sin. “The fool says in his heart, There 
is no God.” 

This is as true in the history of nations as 
it is in the history of individuals. You will 
find that a period of coarse, dogmatic unbelief, 


THE UNBELIEF OF THE FOOL 203 


of blunt and almost savage negation, has ever 
been coincident with national folly, with wide- 
spread national shame. The nation has again 
and again sunk into obscurity and profligacy, 
and from its degradation you can hear the wild, 
triumphant shout, “ There is no God.” Go into 
the latter part of the seventeenth century, or 
into the early part of the eighteenth, and you 
will find that the national thought was shaped 
and determined by the national life. Ungodly 
living was the father of ungodly thinking. 
Much of the nation’s unbelief sprang from the 
nation’s sin. The corrupt nation desired to be 
rid of the thought of God, and so it persuaded 
itself into an unbelief which affirmed, “ There is 
no God.” In men and in nations the frequent 
outcome of folly and of sin is a blatant and 
mock-heroic unbelief. 

Now, I do not wish to say that the fool arrives 
at his savage unbelief in a day. That is often 
the ultimate conclusion attained through sin. 
But there are intermediate stages in this path 
of moral and spiritual degradation. It may be 
that a man’s sin has not yet brought him to this 
final negation of God, while yet he may have 
assuredly started upon the steep decline which 
leads to it. It may be that there are souls who 


204 THE UNBELIEF OF THE FOOL 


are in the way to a bragging and cynical unbelief, 
and who have not yet noticed the early symptoms 
which unmistakably reveal their decline. Let us 
look at it. When a man has taken some im- 
purity into his heart, the first result may not 
be open and bragging unbelief. When a worm 
gets into the root of a sensitive plant, the first 
result may be a sense of general sickliness, a 
loss of brightness, an unhealthy drooping at the 
leaf. And when some worm gets into a man’s 
heart, when some secret sin crawls into his soul— 
when, say, the love of money gets into his roots, or 
some unnamable lust, or an evil spirit of bitter- 
ness or revenge, then there creeps over that man’s 
religious life a general sickliness; its brightness 
departs ; all its spiritual interests begin to droop, 
and his soul becomes languid and weary. Have 
we ever sufficiently marked that suggestive con- 
junction in the Book of Isaiah, where the sins of 
Israel are named and deplored, and where, after 
their rebellious acts have all been declared, God 
says, “And thou hast been weary of Me, O 
Israel”? One followed as the consequence of 
the other. They sinned, and their sins made 
them spiritually sickly, and they wearied of God. 
They sinned, and by their sin they lost their 
bright and eager interest in the Holy One. Let 


THE UNBELIEF OF THE FOOL 205 


me quote from the Prophet even a more sugges- 
tive figure still, “Ephraim is joined to idols ”— 
well, what then p—and “their drink is sour.” Do 
we appreciate the force of that most graphic and 
powerful figure? They were wont to approach 
Jehovah in glad and eager worship. Yea, worship 
had been their meat and drink, sweet and refresh- 
ing to their souls. But now, they have gone the 
way of sin, and the worship which once was 
sweet to their hearts now tastes bitter and sour. 
“Ephraim is joined to idols—their drink is sour.” 
You know that in the physical life, when we are 
unwell and sickly, the sweetest food, which we 
have usually relished, is nauseous and unpalatable. 
The food has not changed. We have changed. 
Our palate has become diseased, sharing in the 
general disorder of the body. It is not otherwise 
in the spiritual life. When our souls are well, 
healthy, holy, the things of God are sweet unto 
our taste. The man of healthy soul can sing 
with the Psalmist, “My meditation of Him shall 
be sweet.” To him God’s thoughts and words are 
“sweeter than honey and the honeycomb.” But 
when some unclean thing enters into us, and makes 
us morally diseased, spiritually unhealthy, then 
the sweet things become sour, and the things 
we relish become unpalatable. That is the first 


206 THE UNBELIEF OF THE FOOL 


result of indwelling sin, a sense of weariness 
and distaste in the things of God. When sin 
enters into a man’s heart, the brightness of his 
interest in religious things departs. His spiritual 
appetite loses its edge, and he prays and wor- 
ships with that yawning weariness and reluctance 
in which a sickly man partakes his food. Let 
us regard the symptom with intense suspicion, 
as the index of a decline which leads to a 
swaggering and licentious unbelief. I have some- 
times had conversation with young men, who have 
been lamenting to me their loss of spiritual eager- 
ness and religious relish, and the encroachment 
of a deep weariness in the worship and service 
of God. Every man knows when that most 
dangerous season begins. In nine cases out of 
ten it means that we are morally disordered. 
We have opened the heart to some insidious 
anti-Christ. We are entertaining some unclean 
spirit, some secret sin, which is corrupting our 
spiritual taste, and rendering us incompetent to 
discern and appreciate “the things which God 
hath prepared for them that love Him.” That is 
the first step in spiritual degradation ! 

But now follow on a step farther. A man 
becomes possessed by this feeling of religious 
weariness. He loses his relish for the things of 


THE UNBELIEF OF THE FOOL 207 


God. His prayers are just long yawns. What 
then? Then he begins to sceptically inquire 
about the use of prayer. A decision is easily 
reached that for him, at any rate, there is no 
use in prayer. But he cannot stop there. He 
needs must justify himself, and he finds the 
amplest and most comfortable justification in 
the more general statement that all prayer is 
useless, a vain farce, a mere baying at the 
moon. I know that along the line of intellectual 
inquiry some men have reached the conclusion 
that prayer is useless. Of that I speak not now. 
I am now tracing the line of moral and spiritual 
degradation, and I say that sin begets a deep 
spiritual distaste and weariness, and this distaste 
begets a sense of the uselessness of prayer. 
Unbelief in prayer is one of the foul offsprings 
of the outraged conscience. When, therefore, I 
hear a man triumphantly and laughingly declare 
that there is no use in prayer, I must know his 
manner of life before I can estimate the value 
of his conclusions. How has he come by his 
unbelief? Is it the production of disease? Has 
he been a fool? Has his moral palate become 
perverted? I will not take my opinions of 
spiritual verities from an unclean man. In these 
matters it remains unwaveringly true that it is the 


208 THE UNBELIEF OF THE FOOL 


pure heart that sees God, and that moves about in 
rare discernment among the forces of the spirit. 

One farther step in this degeneracy will bring 
us to the conclusion. A man who has lost all 
belief in prayer to God will speedily pass to 
the judgment that there is no God to pray to, 
Here, then, is the range of spiritual degradation. 
It begins in folly ; it ends in unbelief. The man 
begins by defying God; he ends by denying Him. 
Uncleanness has worked to spiritual death. What, 
then, shall be the fruitful warning which we may 
apply to the guidance of our own spirits? Be- 
ware of the entrance of all uncleanness. “ Create 
in me a clean heart, O God.” A life which is 
preserved in spiritual purity will move in constant 
homage before the revealed presence of the Eternal 
God. “Search me, O God, and try me, and see 
if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in 
the way everlasting.” 


XVI 


THE BAPTISM OF FIRE 


‘I baptize you with water... He shall baptize you with 
fire.” —MATTHEW iii, II. 
WaTER and fire! Our two great cleansing 
ministrants! The means we employ to rid our- 
selves of refuse and filth! Which is the more 
searching, the more powerful agent, water or fire? 
There are some deeply established uncleannesses 
for which the action of water is not sufficiently 
stringent. In many cases of contagious disease, 
if we are to rid ourselves of every vestige of 
corruption, there are many things which must be 
burnt. The germs of the contagion could not be 
washed away. They must be consumed away. 
Water would be altogether insufficient. We need 
fire! Fire is our most effective purifying minister, 
a powerful and relentless enemy of disease. In 
1665 London was in the grip of that terrible 


Plague, the horrors of which may still be felt 
P 


210 THE BAPTISM OF FIRE 


through the pages of Defoe. The disease germs 
were hiding and breeding and multiplying every- 
where. Every corner became a nest of contagion. 
Nothing could be found to displace it. In the 
following year the Great Fire broke out, and the 
plague-smitten city was possessed by the spirit 
of burning. London was literally baptized with 
fire, which sought out the most secret haunts of 
the contagion, and in the fiery baptism the evil 
genius of corruption gave place to the sweet and 
friendly genius of health. Fire accomplished 
quite easily what water would never have attained. 
And so in a comparison of fire and water as 
cleansing and redeeming agencies, common ex- 
perience tells us that fire is the keener, the more 
searching, the more powerful, the more intense. 
Well, now, here is John the Baptist, the last 
and the first of the prophets, heralding the 
kingdom of God. John the Baptist is a great 
man; “among them that are born of women 
none greater.” He is a man with a clear and 
definite message, and therefore with a clear and 
definite mission. He is engaged in the holy task 
of calling men to repentance, of summoning them 
to more serious thought, to purer and sweeter 
feeling, to a larger and more unselfish life. The 
purpose of his mission is the cleansing of the 


THE BAPTISM OF FIRE air 


human heart. “I baptize you with water.” 
The baptism of John is a baptism by no means to 
be despised, but over and above his own baptism 
he exalts the baptism of the Christ. “I baptize 
you with water ... He shall baptize you with 
fire.” He brings into contrast the cleansing and 
reviving powers of the two baptisms. If you will 
pay heed to my counsel, be faithful to my 
teaching, a purging influence shall begin to work 
in your lives. But the cleansing influence which 
is created within you by my baptism has only the 
power of water. There is a purity, a passionate 
holiness, which cannot be gained by my cleansing. 
I baptize you with water. But when the Christ 
is come, He will create within you the cleansing 
powers which shall operate in your lives like fire, 
redeeming influences more thorough, more pene- 
trating, and more vital. When He is come, He 
will change water into fire, a spirit of cold obedi- 
ence into a burning enthusiasm, a lukewarm and 
dutiful disposition into the eager passion of love. 
I baptize you with water ... He shall baptize 
you with fire.” 

Now let us confine ourselves for a little while 
to one line of inquiry, and see how this deep and 
powerful change might be effected. Let us 
approach the subject by the path of analogy. 


212 THE BAPTISM OF FIRE 


You know how immensely wide is the contrast in 
the effects produced upon the minds of children 
in presenting truth to them as an abstraction, and 
presenting it in a concrete dress. Suppose I 
begin to discourse to a number of children on 
some abstract truth. Suppose I use no illustra- 
tions, no analogies, no anecdotes. Suppose I 
decline to enshrine the truth in a vision, or picture, 
or tale, and present it to them as a pure abstrac- 
tion—what effect shall I produce? At the best 
only a vague and stupid wonder. But, now, let 
us take the abstract truth and wrap it up in an 
illustration. Let it shine through the vesture of a 
story. Let it be embodied in a parable or a 
fairy-tale. What then will be the effect? Vague 
and fruitless wonder will immediately pass into 
vivid and pointed interest. But assume still 
further that we present the truth, not in an inter- 
esting story, but in an actual personality, in 
some living, breathing man. Then the influence 
produced will still further be deepened ; the feel- 
ings created will be far more vivid and intense. 
Let me attempt to give this analogy greater 
definiteness by somewhat narrowing its range. 
Suppose I take the subject of heroism and discuss 
it before an assembly of children as an abstraction. 
I deal with it philosophically. I analyse it into 


THE BAPTISM OF FIRE 213 


its various mental and moral ingredients, and 
discuss the many minor attributes of which it is 
composed. What impression shall I create? 
Little or none ; nothing more than an uneasy and 
fearful wonder. But now, instead of dealing with 
heroism as an abstraction, let me put it into a 
tale, and tell them the story of some courageous 
man, the story of a Livingstone, or a Damien, or 
a Gordon. At once the shifting, indifferent 
wonder changes into a keen and interested atten- 
tion. But let me go further, and instead of 
embodying the virtue in the story of some brave 
man, let the truth become incarnate, let the 
“Word become flesh,” and let me produce the 
heroic man himself, engaged in the heroic life. 
What, then, will be the result? The pointless 
wonder which followed the abstraction will change 
into a passionate admiration, which will further 
ripen into a fertile love. Now, what is the 
principle upon which all this is based? It is just 
this, that the operative influences which are 
created by truth in the heart of a child are 
determined in their depth and energy by the 
manner of its presentation, by the stage which has 
been reached on the pathway which begins in 
truth as an abstraction, and ends in truth as an 
incarnation, From abstraction to personality 


214 THE BAPTISM OF FIRE 


carries the feelings from chilling and indifferent 
wonder to eager and passionate love. 

Now, see how this applies to the revelation of 
God and man’s relationship to Him. In the 
earliest days God was almost an abstraction to 
His people. What was His name? “I am that 
Iam.” What can you make of that? There is 
no colour in it, nothing to lay hold of, nothing to 
lean upon. “I am that I am,” a revelation 
just calculated to awake a feeling of wonder 
and fear. That was one of the earliest names in 
which the character of God embodied itself. But 
step by step God reveals Himself in experiences 
which create more definite and winsome names, 
and these names find their way into song and 
story. He begins to be known as “ Refuge,” as 
“Rock,” as “ Tower,” as “ Shield.” He comes to 
be regarded as man’s “Shepherd,” because of the 
shepherdliness which His people perceive in the 
growing scope of His dealings with them. Put 
that name “Shepherd” side by side with the 
name “I am that I am.” The colours of the 
character are beginning to emerge and shine in 
the growing light, and as the revelation passes 
further and further away from abstraction, and 
enshrines itself in that which is compassable and 
concrete, the influences created in man’s heart 


THE BAPTISM OF FIRE 215 


become proportionately richer, more powerful, and 
more pregnant. In the fulness of time the last 
vestige of abstraction is removed. God remains 
no longer embodied in sweet and beautiful names, 
and renowned in song and story. He becomes 
incarnate in the flesh. He appears before men 
as the Christ. He stands out among them to 
be gazed upon—a living and all-beautiful per- 
sonality. The “I am that I am” reveals Him- 
self in “Jesus of Nazareth.” Don’t you think 
that the heart-influences created by the “I am 
that I am” were incomparably weaker than the 
heart -influences created by “the Man, Christ 
Jesus”? Don’t you think that the spiritual 
energy begotten by the Shepherd God would be 
only thin and sluggish compared with the energy 
begotten by the Jesus God? The different 
influences created in men were analogous to the 
different effects produced upon children by ab- 
straction and personality. When the “ Word 
became flesh,” piety became transfused with 
passion ; water was changed into fire. “I baptize 
you with water,” says the prophet John. The 
revelation which I have proclaimed has made you 
penitent, humble, and obedient, and this, indeed, 
has helped to cleanse and save you. But my 
baptism has only been the cleansing of water. 


216. THE BAPTISM OF FIRE 


The Christ who comes will reveal God in Him- 
self, in His own person ; and the revelation which 
He will make will be so full of unspeakable glory 
as to create in men a cleansing energy like fire, 
for their hearts shall become inflamed with an 
enthusiastic love. 

Such, I think, is the great truth involved in 
the text which I wish now to submit to one or 
two practical applications. Let me say, first— 
what, indeed, has been involved in all that I have 
tried to say—that passionate religious enthusiasm 
attaches itself to a person ; and the more near and 
real our intercourse with the person, the more 
beautiful will be our holiness, and the more fiery- 
hearted will be our service and devotion. Just 
think for a moment what magnificent import this 
revelation in the person of Jesus had for those 
Jews who became His disciples. The religion of 
the Jews had become an obedience to precept and 
laws. The germ of their national faith is to be 
found in those ten laws which we call the Ten 
Commandments. But to these ten laws the 
Rabbis had made countless additional laws, petty, 
trying, and irritating laws which had come to be 
regarded as of equal importance with the original 
ten. To the earnest Jew the warm, loving pur- 
pose of God had become buried in a mountainous 


THE BAPTISM OF FIRE 217 


mass of man-made traditions. It was no longer 
God with whom the Jew was dealing, but this vast 
dead-weight of Rabbinical law. God had become 
to them an earth-born system, a burdensome 
“ism,” a heavy and smothering tradition. Then 
came the Christ, and the first thing He did was 
to tear these miles of wrappages away. He cast 
aside the traditions of the elders. He cried to 
the people, “You have been looking at an ‘ism,’ 
and you thought you were looking at God. 
Now look on me. He that hath seen me 
hath seen the Father.” Christ lifted God out 
of abstraction, out of dead regulations and tra- 
ditions, and presented the image of the eternal 
glory in His own person. God was.no longer a 
burdensome law, but a great, near, and loving 
personality. And what happened to those dis- 
ciples who received the revelation? Cold obedience 
to law was changed into enthusiastic obedience to 
a person. Cold and lukewarm water was changed 
into hot and cleansing fire. Take a modern Jew 
who has been converted into the Christian faith, 
and you will find that one of the favourite phrases 
by which he tries to give expression to his 
experience is this, “I feel a fire burning within 
me.” What does’*he mean? He means that the 
sense of ica discipleship to law has become 


218 THE BAPTISM OF FIRE 


changed into a consciousness of warm discipleship 
to a person. He was baptized with water, now 
he is baptized with fire. 

Is this in any way significant of the need of 
the Church to-day? Are we altogether beyond 
the need of this old warning, that an enthusiastic 
and saving and safe religious life can only be 
obtained by an intimate communion with the 
living Christ? Is the general church life of the 
English nation to-day characterised by devotion 
to an “ism” or by a personal passion for Christ ? 
Are we trying to do by water what can only be 
done by fire? How is it with the character of 
the Church? Has she put on her beautiful 
garments, the garments of a holy and sanctified 
life? By cold obedience the Church can never 
be holy. If the Church would be pure the 
Church must be passionate. Why, the very heart 
of the word “pure” is suggestive of fire. It is 
significant of an end which has been reached 
through the ministry of flame. You cannot have 
purity without burning ; you cannot have holiness 
without the baptism of fire. When devotion 
burns low, and personal piety smoulders down 
into a cold spirit of obedience, the “beauty of 
holiness” becomes an impossible attainment. But 
when devotion is fiery, when religion ‘is enthusi- 


THE BAPTISM OF FIRE 219 


astic, when piety is passionate, then you have the 
very fire from the altar of God, in which all 
uncleannesses are purged away. There is a 
phrase used by the prophet Isaiah which always 
appears to me to be pregnant with a profound 
truth of religious experience: “The Lord shall 
wash away their filth... by the spirit of 
burning.” What is to be the cleansing agency? 
A “spirit of burning,” a baptism of fire! A 
flame shall be kindled in the life, and in the 
“spirit of burning” the moral filth, which nothing 
else could remove, shall be consumed away. 
Have we not had abundant evidence of this 
washing by burning in all ages of the Christian 
Church? There is Mary Magdalene — poor, 
wretched, unclean Magdalene, possessing in her- 
self no cleansing ministrant to cleanse away her 
filth. Judaism can offer a baptism of water, but 
the baptism of Judaism leaves the deeper plague 
untouched. And she comes to the Master, and 
the Master pities her, and she loves Him for His 
pity, and her love brings into her life the re- 
deeming forces of the atoning God. That per- 
sonal love for the personal Christ was the fire 
that cleansed her; “the spirit of burning” in 
which her filth was washed away. In Mary’s 
heart was begotten a passionate love for the 


220 THE BAPTISM OF FIRE 


Christ, and her chaff was burnt up with un- 
quenchable fire. 

It is even so to-day. In personal and in 
corporate life we shall be cleansed by the “ spirit 
of burning.” We march to holiness through fire. 
Like the air, the water, and everything else in 
the world, the heart, too, rises the higher the 
warmer it becomes. “Because he hath set his 
love upon me”—-what? “I will set him on 
high.” Elevation of character depends upon 
warmth of affection. Here, then, is the secret 
why the Church is not radiant with the white 
robes of a sanctified life, and is still found wearing 
the grey, compromising garments of the world. 
The temperatures of the world and the Church 
are too much akin, and the uncleanness which is 
natural to the one still clings to the other. The 
Church must rise above the world by the elevating 
force of her own internal heat. The Church will 
lose her worldliness when she gains the “ spirit of 
burning.” She will put on an unearthly beauty 
when she loses the spirit of a cold discipleship, 
and is baptized with the fire of passionate love for 
the personal Christ. 

But this is not all. An enthusiastic religious 
life is not merely the only saving religious life, 
it is the only religious life that is safe. The 


THE BAPTISM OF FIRE 221 


defensive energy of character is born out of its 
own heat. The self-preserving power of a virtue 
is in direct proportion to the passion with which 
it is pursued. Honesty, pursued reluctantly, 
has but little resisting power against the freezing 
influence of the world. Truth, pursued with luke- 
warmness, is easily chilled into expediency and 
compromise. A virtue must have a core of heat 
if it is to be in any worthy measure self-defensive. 
And that is the strength of the enthusiastic soul. 
A fiery heart, by the energy of its own heat, 
creates a self-preserving atmosphere against the 
devil. Cold hearts and lukewarm hearts have no 
protective atmosphere; their discipleship lacks 
inherent energy, and is as salt without savour, 
principle without passion, coals without fire, good 
for nothing! The energy of our passion is our 
defence! That isastriking and suggestive phrase 
of the Old Testament Scriptures, “Clad with zeal 
as a cloak ”—zeal clinging about us like a pro- 
tecting vesture, our defence a garment of fire! 
The phrase enshrines a truth which has received 
confirmation in every age of the Christian Church. 
Lukewarmness is never safe. A man’s defences 
are gone when he loses his zeal. A chilling and 
benumbing worldliness steals in upon the Church 
when she loses her vesture of fire. The only 


222 THE BAPTISM OF FIRE 


safety for you and for me and for all men is that 
we be baptized with fire, enwrapped in an atmo- 
sphere of protective zeal, and that we lay aside our 
cold or lukewarm discipleship to an “ism,” and 
become possessed with a passionate, enthusiastic 
love for the person of our Lord and Saviour, 
Jesus Christ. 

How is this baptism of fire to be obtained? 
How is this spiritual enthusiasm to be kindled ; 
and, when kindled, how is it to be kept burning? 
These questions are by no means impertinent. 
Our modern church-life abounds in externalism, in 
welcome and beneficent externalism; but I think 
there are few of us who are not sensible of a 
danger lest the wide divergencies of our interests 
should diminish and impoverish the intensity of 
our devotion. How did our fathers keep the fire 
burning? There are some words which one finds 
very frequently in their letters, and diaries, and 
sermons, which awaken similar feelings to those 
aroused by types of extinct species which are 
sometimes unearthed from the deposits of a far-off 
and unfamiliar age. Here are two such words, 
“meditation” and “contemplation” ; words which 
appear to suggest an unfamiliar day when the 
world was young, and haste was not yet born, 
and men moved among their affairs with long and 


THE BAPTISM OF FIRE 223 


leisurely strides. Our fathers steeped their souls 
in meditation. They appointed long seasons for 
the contemplation of God in Christ. And as 
they mused the fire burned. Passion was born of 
thought. What passion? The passion which 
Faber so beautifully describes as the desire which 
purifies man and glorifies God :— 


Nought honours God like the thirst of desire, 
Nor possesses the heart so completely with Him ; 
For it burns the world out with the swift ease of fire, 
And fills life with good works till it runs o’er the brim. 


We live in a busy, perspiring time, with a 
thousand clamant calls assailing us on every side ; 
but if we are to be possessed by this fiery thirst 
of desire, this enthusiastic longing for God, we 
shall have to provide the conditions out of which 
the passion is born. We shall have to make time 
to contemplate God. The spirit of meditation 
must be reintroduced into our fruitless feverishness, 
and our passion for things transformed into a 
thirst for God. Our activities are in danger of 
bustling out our passivities. The spirit of Mary 
is being exiled, and the spirit of Martha is pre- 
dominant. The Church must give herself time to 
kindle and time to pray. We must give ourselves 
time for visions, if we would worthily. accomplish 


224 THE BAPTISM OF FIRE 


our tasks. Let us muse upon the King in His 
beauty, let us commune more with His loveliness, 
let us dwell more in the secret place, and the 
unspeakable glory of His countenance shall create 
within us that enthusiastic passion which shall be 
to us our baptism of fire, a fire in which every- 
thing unchristian shall be utterly consumed away. 


Oh, then wish more for Him, burn more with desire, 
Covet more the dear sight of His marvellous face, 

Pray louder, pray longer for the sweet gift of fire, 

To come down on thy heart, with its whirlwinds of grace. 


XVII 
ABIDING IN CHRIST 
JOHN xv. ry 7. 


“ ABIDE in Me.” The words proclaim a warning 
against spiritual vagrancy, against intermittent 
consecration, against a spasmodic religious life. 
They throw into contrast a discipleship of alternate 
spurts and lethargy, and a discipleship of calm 
and firm persistence. There is a religion of the 
gypsy type, devoid of settledness, a touch-and-go 
fellowship, wanting in continuity and rest. And 
there is a religion whose type is the settled place 
of abode, a fellowship steady and unfailing, whose 
inclinations are fixed as by some stupendous force 
of spiritual gravity. 

There are some people who wzszt Christ. There 
are others who adzde zn Him. To the one class 
religion is a temporary expedient: to the other it 
is a permanent principle. To the one class Christ 
is an occasional shelter: to the other He is an 

Q 


226 ABIDING IN CHRIST 


“eternal home.” By which of the two classes 
shall we judge the power and ministry of the 
Christian religion? The evidence afforded by a 
day-tripper is scarcely sufficient if we want to 
know the merits of a health resort, the purity and 
nimbleness of its air, and the medicinal qualities 
of its springs. The tripper must give place to 
the inhabitant: the man who dwells in the sweet, 
clean air must have priority over the vagrant 
whose secret lungs were never bathed in the 
bracing flood. But when we come to religion, the 
order is frequently reversed. The evidence afforded 
by the shifting and hurrying visitor is often pre- 
ferred to the witness of the dweller in the promised 
land. If I want to form a conclusion concerning 
the Kingdom of God, I will disregard the religious 
tripper, and I will seek my evidence among the 
oldest inhabitants. Let us find out the men and 
women “who abide,” who have made their home 
there, who breathe in it as in their native air, and 
whom nothing can tempt away from the gracious 
country ; and from the health and sweetness and 
wholesomeness of their living let us form our 
judgments concerning the healing and restoring 
powers of the Christian redemption. Spasmodic 
fellowship robs the Lord of His opportunity, and 
interferes with His restoring ministry. He wants 


ABIDING IN CHRIST 227 


us to “abide” in Him that our invigoration may 
be thorough and permanent. 

“Abide in Me.” What is meant by abiding 
in Christ? Let us look at the implications of the 
great word. To abide in Christ ts to maintain our 
belief in Him. 1am to take the claims of Christ ; 
His statements concerning His prerogatives and 
rights ; His teachings concerning God and man, 
and life and duty ; His Gospel concerning sin and 
forgiveness, and the dynamics of holiness; His 
warning concerning the direful issues of unrepented 
wrong ;—I am to take them and exalt them into 
the dignity of beliefs, immediate and operative 
factors in my daily life. It is belief that creates 
“abiding” ; mere opinion consorts with vagrancy. 
Opinion is a mental judgment; belief is mental 
judgment applied. Opinions are loose ideas, 
roaming at large in the spacious field of the mind; 
beliefs are opinions caught and yoked in the 
service of practical life. In opinion there is no 
venture; belief is opinion risked; it is opinion 
converted into principle, and entrusted with the 
government of the life. Or, if I may again change 
the figure—opinions are the patterns hanging 
about the walls of the weaving-shed, or resting 
upon the shelves; beliefs are the patterns in 
working looms, directing the shuttles, determining 


228 ABIDING IN CHRIST 


the threads, and commanding the character of the 
ultimate and finished fabric. Such is the distinc- 
tion I desire to emphasise. I am to take the 
revelation given to me in Christ, and risk it in 
practical life. I am to put His pattern into my 
loom. The weaving of my character is to be 
determined by His claims. I am to venture on 
His teaching. That is belief—to exalt His 
claims into my principles, to make His teach- 
ings my assumptions, and to march along the 
indicated way, even though it frown before me 
in looming storm and threatened pain and 


crucifixion. “Let not your heart be troubled ; 
believe!” To believe in Christ is the secret of 
abiding. 


“ Abide in me.” What other implications are 
there in the wealthy word? To abide in Christ 
_ we must preserve the means of our attachment. We 
must guard the lines of communication. There 
are certain ministries which have been appointed 
as channels of grace, through which man’s fellow- 
ship with God may be strengthened and enriched. 
I say they are means of attachment, lines of com- 
munication; and unless they are vigilantly guarded 
we become isolated, cut away from our resources 
in Christ. I do not know how any one is to abide 
in vital communion with Christ who neglects the 


ABIDING IN CHRIST 229 


ministry of prayer. It is a line of communica- 
tion which many men allow to get into the hands 
of the enemy, and they become severed from “the 
supply of the Spirit of Christ” which keeps life 
fresh and sweet and aspiring. I wish we could 
change our emphasis a little in our thought about 
this matter of prayer. We commonly regard it as 
a duty ; I wish we could think of it as a necessity. 
I think that perhaps the perverted emphasis arises 
from a misinterpretation of common symptoms. 
If we could only rightly read our symptoms, we 
should discover our necessities. “Why art thou 
cast down, O my soul, and why art thou disquieted 
within me?” What are the symptoms? Spiritual 
depression and unrest. How shall we interpret 
the symptoms? “Oh, a few days in the country 
or by the sea is all that is needed.” And yet, in 
many instances, a more accurate diagnosis would 
reveal the fact that the cardinal necessity is not a 
sojourn by the sea, but a restored communion with 
God. The primary cause is not overwork, but 
neglected prayer! Take a blown-out taper, the 
only remnant of whose flame is a swiftly blacken- 
ing spark, and plunge it into a jar of oxygen, and 
the dying ember will revive and regain its lost 
ascendency. And take a soul whose fire of vitality 
is blackening down into depression and pessimism, 


230 ABIDING IN CHRIST 


and immerse it in the reviving breath of the Holy 
Spirit, and aspiration will kindle again, and black 
depression will change into radiant hope. That is 
the very ministry of prayer, to keep the spirit of 
man in the oxygenating fellowship of the Spirit of 
God ; and if we neglect the ministry, and cease to 
keep the communication open, we can no more be 
saved from spiritual depression and unrest than 
men who are immured in ill-ventilated chambers 
can save themselves from physical lassitude and 
perilous sleep. If we would abide in Christ, we 
must “pray without ceasing.” 

But I do not know how any one is going to 
pray with wealthy efficiency who deliberately 
neglects the companion mznzstry of public worship. 
Prayer is raised to its highest power when it is 
the fellowship of Christian believers. Its strength 
is then the strength of the individual hearts plus 
their unity. Any man who cuts himself adrift 
from his fellows narrows his communion with 


God. 


Bright Thy presence when it breaketh, 
Lord, on some rapt soul apart ; 
Sweet Thy Spirit when it speaketh 
Peace unto some lonely heart ; 
Blest the raptures 
From unaided lips that start. 


ABIDING IN CHRIST 231 


But more bright Thy presence dwelleth 
In a waiting, burning throng ; 
Yet more sweet the rapture swelleth 
Of a many-voiced song ; 
More divinely 
Glows each soul glad souls among. 


Aad so I counsel that, in order to abide in Christ, 
we guard these means of attachment, these 
gracious ministries of prayer and public worship. 
Maintaining our belief, and preserving these 
attachments, the mystic interdependence will be 
effected. We shall abide in Christ, and He will 
abide in us. The Bible has almost exhausted 
available analogies in seeking to suggest how rich 
and abounding are the vitalising forces which will 
flow to the believers in Christ through the 
channels of an opened communion. “He that 
believeth in the Son hath life.” This vitalising 
grace shall operate upon the spirits of men after 


”» 


the manner of “ showers,” “ rivers,” “ winds,” “ fire,” 
“water,” “bread.” Contradictory emblems have 
to be employed in order to give expression to the 
manifold ministry of reviving grace. But all the 
symbols and emblems appear to converge in one 
supreme suggestion—that the imparted grace of 
God is a force which empowers and enriches the 


very roots of personality. It is a “centre” 


232 ABIDING IN CHRIST 


ministry, giving volume and force to the very 
springs of being. “I am come that ye might 
have life!” 

Will all this be regarded as mysticism run 
mad? Why should it be thought incredible? 
Do we not know in familiar life, and on purely 
human planes, that one spirit can flow into 
another spirit with enervating or invigorating 
influence? Familiar companionships have depths 
and experiences which lead to the realm of the 
mystical. If there be spiritual infection and con- 
tagion as between man and man, why should it 
be thought incredible that in this fellowship that 
is called “abiding,” the Spirit of the glorified 
Christ should breathe upon the spirit of man and 
sublime him into undreamed-of possibilities of 
power and refinement ? 

What would be the fruits of “abiding”? First 
of all, fulness of living. “ The same beareth much 
fruit.’ Yam not going to limit that word “ fruit” 
to any particular type of so-called practical service, 
We are not yet in the realm of “doing”; we are 
still in the realm of “being.” We are still in the 
inner man, in the secret places of the life. Just 
think for a moment of man’s rich and complex 
personality. It is possible for men to be only 
partially alive. A man can live departmentally, 


ABIDING IN CHRIST 233 


and not as a whole. For instance, a man can 
be mentally awake but not sympathetic. A 
man can be kind and yet carnal. A man can 
be conscientious and discourteous. Nay, the 
severing analysis can be more subtle and dis- 
criminating still. A man can be only partially 
generous; he is prodigal of his money, but 
niggardly of his time ; he is always ready to give 
you a ten-pound note for Christian service, but 
he won’t give you a slice of his time. On the 
other hand, there are men who are prodigal of 
their time, but miserly with their money; they 
will give you abundant service, but it is a bleeding 
martyrdom to give you gold. Well, here is a 
strange phenomenon ! How do you explain it? 
Perhaps Hosea supplies the explanation: “Ephraim 
is a cake not turned.” He is baked only on one 
side. He only partially lives. He is alive in 
compartments, but not as a whole. Or to recur 
to the figure of the text, he only bears fruit 
partially ; there are many branches upon his tree 
which yield nothing but leaves. “He that 
abideth in Me and I in him, the same beareth 
much frutt.” It is an increase of fruitfulness. 
We pass from the partial to the entire, from 
particular branches to the full and well-propor- 
tioned tree. “The fruit of the Spirit is in a2 


234 ABIDING IN CHRIST 


goodness.” When the divine and the human 
interpenetrate, the fructifying powers are enor- 
mously increased, and the tree of the individual 
life bears all manner of fruits. I don’t think any 
man can ever know his fruit-growing capacity 
until he is possessed by the Spirit of God. It 
seems to me that when the supernatural comes 
the natural can assert itself in wealthy freedom. 
There is a word in the gospel by Matthew which 
I think is not without its significance. “They 
brought to Him a dumb man possessed with a 
devil. And when the devil was cast out, the 
dumb spake.” The natural power was released 
when the spiritual bondage was destroyed. I 
think this suppression of natural power is more 
widespread than we believe. There are powers 
dumb because devils reign. There are branches 
barren because divine communion is checked and 
choked. The influx of the divine would mean 
the emancipation of the human. The natural 
would assert itself under the knightly ministry of 
the supernatural. Man would become alive, and 
all his slumbering possibilities would awake, and 
move in aspiring progress towards a perfect and 
glorious realisation. “He that abideth in Me, 
and I in him, the same beareth much fruit.” 
What other issues may be found in the fruits 


ABIDING IN CHRIST 235 


of “abiding”? You will find the gracious product 
described in verse seven. “If ye abide in Me 

. ask whatsoever ye will, and it shall be done 
unto you.” “ Whatsoever ye will.” A thoughtless 
interpretation of that great word has plunged 
many souls into profound bewilderment and pain. 
Things have been asked, and they have not been 
given. What is the explanation? The con- 
clusion of the great promise has been taken 
without the premises. The offer has been seized, 
but the conditions ignored. What are the con- 
ditions? “If ye abide in Me, and My words 
abide in you.” Suppose the conditions were 
observed. If this interpretation of the human 
and the divine were an actuality: I, seeking my 
aim and motive and hope in the Lord, dwelling 
among the Lord’s thoughts; my life governed by 
my beliefs; the Lord filling my life as air fills 
a chamber, breathing upon thought and purpose 
and feeling ;—if these conditions were realised, 
what kind of “askings” would there be? I 
should be so in tune with the Infinite that my 
askings would be His willings, and my desires 
would harmonise with the profoundly spiritual 
purposes of His great redemptive works. We do 
not abide, and so we are not attuned, and so we 
ask what cannot be given. We want lofty asking, 


236 ABIDING IN CHRIST 


and lofty asking implies high planes of thinking, 
and high planes of thinking imply unbroken 
fellowship with Christ. “If we abide... ye 
shall ask . . . and it shall be done.” And so the 
two fruits of abiding which I desire to emphasise 
are just these: fulness of life and kinship with the 
divine. What, then, shall be the practical out- 
come of this meditation? Let us begin the 
“abiding.” In his Movum Organum Bacon gives 
utterance to a conviction which shall express the 
purpose of this concluding appeal :—“ The ques- 
tion whether anything can be known is to be 
settled not by arguing but by trying.” “ Abide in 
Me.” Try it; try it; and you shall find the issue 
in fruitful and abundant life. 


XVIII 


THE GREAT ENFRANCHISEMENT 


“Unto Him that loveth us, and loosed us from our sins by His 

blood ; and He made us to be a Kingdom, to be priests unto 
His God and Father ; to Him be the glory and the dominion 
for ever and ever.” REVELATION i. 5. 


“UNTO Him that loveth us.” That is where our 
hopes are born. That is the background in which 
we find the base and the warrant for all our 
confidence and faith. God loves us. All effective 
reasoning concerning human redemption must 
begin here. God loves! The beginning is not 
to be found in us, in our inclinations and gropings 
and resolvings and prayers. These are essential 
but secondary. The primary element is the 
inclination of God. The fire which warms the 
hearthstone is not original; it is derivative, and 
refers us back tothe sun. The candle with which 
we search for the lost piece of silver is not original 
and originating ; it is borrowed flame from the 
great altar-fires of the sun. Earth’s broken lights, 


238 THE GREAT ENFRANCHISEMENT 


a candle here, a lamp there, a fire yonder, all index 
backwards, and point us to the great originating 
centre of solar light and heat. The lamps and 
candles and fires that burn in human life, every- 
thing that is bright and genial and aspiring, have 
reference backward to some creative and beneficent 
source. “We love, because He first loveth us.” 
“ He first loveth!” That is the primary quantity, 
and every kindly feeling that warms the heart, 
every pure hope that illumines the mind, were 
begotten of that most gracious source. “ He first 
loveth!” When did He begin to love? “I have 
loved thee with an everlasting love.” Up from 
the everlasting! “Before I formed thee in the 
belly I knew thee.” The primordial germ is not 
a material plasm, or a fire-tuft. Let us trace our 
pedigree far enough back into the love-purpose of 
the Everlasting. This is the Biblical account of 
our origin, of the primary movement that gave 
our being its birth :—“ He first loveth.” Nobody 
comes into the world God-hated. It is possible to 
come into the world man-hated, or with most 
reluctant and indifferent welcome. But behind 
everybody is God, and God is love. Every- 
body’s pedigree begins in love. A glance into 
origins is a look into love. That is the all- 
sufficient warrant of human hope and confidence. 


THE GREAT ENFRANCHISEMENT 239 


“Unto Him that loveth us.” Loveth! Then 
the gracious sentiment did not exhaust itself with 
our origin. “Unto Him that loveth.” The 
affection is continuous; not spasmodic, but un- 
broken ; there is no abatement of its volume. “The 
river of God is full of water,” and it flows near the 
life that it first created. There is a highroad 
which I knew full well away in the distant North, 
and a gladsome, shining river keeps it company. 
Their tracks remain in closest fellowship. They 
turn and wind together, and at any moment you 
may step from the dusty highway and drink deep 
draughts from the limpid stream. “There is a 
river, the streams whereof make glad the city of 
God.” Here is the hard, dusty highway of the 
individual life, and near it there flows the glad- 
dening river of the Eternal Love. It turns with 
our turnings, and winds through all the perplexing 
labyrinths of our intensely varied day. We may 
ignore the river; we cannot ignore it away 
Thrice blessed are they who heed and use it. 
“They drank of that spiritual Rock that followed 
them, and that Rock was Christ.” The inspiring 
resources are always just at hand. The river of 
love runs just by the hard road. It never parts 
company with the highway. “He first loved.” 
“Unto Him that loveth.” “Having loved... He 


240 THE GREAT ENFRANCHISEMENT 


will love unto the end.” “I have loved thee with 
an everlasting love.” That is the point to fix the 
vision when we wish to re-enkindle hope in our 
ultimate and perfected redemption. “ Unto Him 
that loveth us.” Love is not an idle sentiment, a 
sweet langour, a gaily-tinted bubble, sailing in the 
quiet summer air. Love is energy, throbbing with 
benevolent purpose, seeking for ever increasing 
ministries through which to express itself in 
beneficent service. Love is no effeminate reverie ; 
it is a hungry spirit of sacrifice. “God so loved 
that He gave!” That is it; love is an imparta- 
tion, a giving, sacrifice unconscious of itself. 
The word “ sacrifice” is not to be found in love’s 
vocabulary. Love gives and gives, and takes it 
as a gracious favour if you will receive the gift. 
Love never sits down to contemplate its sacrifices. 
It only sits down to think out new fields of 
service. Love is tremendous energy, hungrily 
keen for the detection of need, that it might fill 
the gaping gap out of its own resources. Exalt 
your conception of love as of a spirit with a 
thousand eyes and a thousand hands, and then 
read anew the words of my text. “Unto ‘Him 
that loveth us!” “Loveth!” Keen eyes; strong- 
hearted ; strong-handed! What need does He 
discover, from Whom there is nothing concealed ? 


THE GREAT ENFRANCHISEMENT 241 


He beholds His children in the bondage of cor- 
ruption and night. He sees them enslaved by 
appalling encumbrances which they cannot dis- 
card. They are the captives of sin and of death. 
How has it all arisen? Shall I give you the 
explanation offered by the Apostle James? Here 
it is. I have a Will, most mystic yet most real. 
This Will was purposed by the Almighty to marry 
the word of Truth, that out of the pure and 
gracious union there might arise all the beauties 
and graces of the divine life. But, says the Apostle 
James, there comes along a lust, subtle and 
bewitching, and it fastens its fascinating eye upon 
the Will, and the Will is enticed. “He is drawn 
away of his own lust and enticed.” It is a most 
unholy union, and begets a most unholy issue. 
“Lust, when it hath conceived, bringeth forth sin,” 
and that is not the end of the awful generation. 
There is a further offspring ; “sin, when it is full- 
grown, bringeth forth death.” Here, then, is the 
consequence of an immoral union ; the soul draws 
into itself enslaving presences, sin and death, and 
it cannot shake them away. The soul is in the 
bondage of guilt. The soul is in the bondage of 
death. Is this an imaginary analysis? Is its 
basis fictional? One of the clearest and calmest 


thinkers of our time, a man who sees far into the 
R 


242 THE GREAT ENFRANCHISEMENT 


secret springs of human life, has given his judg- 
ment that the most real terrors that afflict men 
are the guilt of sin and the fear of death. You 
don’t find the evidence of this upon the surface. 
Men do not like these things to walk abroad, and 
they seek to bury them in the deepest graves. 
But the terror is often the most real where the 
outer life appears undisturbed. It is often the 
man who is whistling who is most afraid of the 
ghost. Do not be misled by the whistle. That 
is only on the lips, while the terror is shaking the 
heart. I have heard men speak of their sins, and 
they could not have spoken about them more 
jauntily or laughingly if there were no God, and 
no great white throne, and no hell! But I have 
not allowed myself to be deceived. The whistling 
has been the index to the reality of their fear, and 
not the proof of its absence. Have you never 
broken into humming and singing to drown the 
voice of your conscience ? Somebody heard you 
suddenly break into singing, and they interpreted 
it as a sign of peace and merriment, while all the 
time its signification was this—a man fighting 
down his ghosts. 

No, do not let us attempt to deceive ourselves. 
Sin is most real; guilt is most real; death is 
most real—not merely the dissolution of the flesh, 


THE GREAT ENFRANCHISEMENT — 243 


but that which the gentle Jesus called the “ outer 
darkness,” the black night of separation from the 
holy presence of God. The bondage is most 
real. How can we obtain deliverance? I want 
deliverance from the baleful shore of guilt. I 
want deliverance from the power of acquired 
habit. I want deliverance from the outer dark- 
ness of death. Where can the liberating power 
be found? I turn to those who have closed the 
Bible, denouncing its remedies as fictional, or at 
the best as antique and obsolete, and I ask them 
what provision they are prepared to put in its 
place. The problem is this: Here is a man, 
guilt-bound, sin-bound, death-bound. Release 
him. Take that haunted chamber of the mind, 
lay the ghosts, and make the chamber into a 
quiet and peaceful living-room. Take the heart, 
and turn out the unclean devils of desire and 
lust, and tenant it with the white-robed angels of 
faith and hope and love. Take the evil power 
out of to-day, and take the black threat out of 
to-morrow. That is the problem, often under- 
estimated because the remedies offered are peddling 
and insufficient. I am not surprised that men 
who close the Bible should so often interpret 
human need as though it were a skin complaint, 
and not a heart disease. It is an old device, and 


244 THE GREAT ENFRANCHISEMENT _ 


you may find the answer to it in the inspired 
word, “Though thou wash thee with nitre, and 
take thee much soap, yet thine iniquity is marked 
before Me, saith the Lord.” That is a word 
which, I think, is peculiarly applicable to our own 
day. Polish is consistent with great depravity. 
Culture may co-exist with rank uncleanness. 
Sandpaper may smooth a surface ; it cannot 
change a substance. The primary need of man 
is not accomplishment but character, and for this 
we require not the washing of culture, but the 
washing of regeneration. It is possible to refine 
away a pimple of uncouthness ; it is not possible 
to refine away guilt. Man can wash himself into 
good manners ; he cannot provide himself with a 
new heart. When education and culture have 
reached their utmost limits, and the mental powers 
are refined into exquisite discernment, the two 
black, gruesome birds of the night remain—guilt 
and death, and only the Eternal Son can disturb 
them, and cause them to flee away. 

Here, then, there comes in the energetic, sleep- 
less ministry of the Eternal Love. “ Unto Him 
that loveth us, and loosed us from our sins by 
His blood.” No man, by his own agony and 
bloody sweat, could wash his robes and make 
them white. ‘“ Unto Him that loveth us, and 


THE GREAT ENFRANCHISEMENT 245 


loosed us from our sins by His blood.” Is the 
loosening real? That question does not suggest 
an argument. I interpret it as a demand for 
proof. Call for those who are “in Christ,” who 
live in Him by faith, and solicit their testimony. 
Call the witness, and let him declare what the 
Lord hath done for his soul. Let us examine 
him. What about thy ghost-chamber, the haunt 
of paralysing fears? Has the Lord laid the 
ghosts? “The peace of God, which passeth all 
understanding,” keeps our minds. “He is our 
peace.” And how is it with thy present tempta- 
tions, with all the fierce onrush of desire and 
lust? “We are more than conquerors through 
Him who loveth us.” And how about to-morrow 
and ... death? “Todie is gain.” The testi- 
mony is eager, persistent, unbroken. The loosen- 
ing is an immediate and urgent reality. However 
real may have been the sense of guilt, the driving 
power of evil inclination, and the chilling fear of 
judgment, the sense of liberty and reconciliation 
is even more real, and life exults with a joy un- 
speakable and full of glory. ‘“ Where sin abounded, 
grace did much more abound: that as sin hath 
reigned unto death, even so might grace reign, 
through righteousness, unto eternal life, by Jesus 
Christ our Lord.” The reality of reconciliation in 


246 THE GREAT ENFRANCHISEMENT 


Christ, of loosening and liberty by His blood, has 
given the keynote and emphasis to the evangel 
which has been the ceaseless glory of this Church. 

“And He made us to be a Kingdom, to be 
priests unto His God and Father.” He “ loosed,” 
and then He ennobled. After emancipation there 
came enfranchisement. We had been in the 
servitude of the evil one, the poor slaves of an 
appalling tyranny. Now we are made a King- 
dom, we become citizens, endowed with a 
sublime franchise, the possessors of unspeakable 
privileges and rights. We are made a “ Kingdom 
of priests.” Every child has the right to share 
the sovereignty of Jesus, and to enjoy free access 
into the most secret place of the Father's pre- 
sence. No longer does He call us “servants,” but 
“friends.” There is no closed door between us 
and Him. We have “the run of the house.” 
We may be “at home with the Lord.” This is 
the issue of the primal loving! The ultimate 
aim of redemption is the creation of a family of 
sanctified children, reigning as kings and queens, 
in the possession of spiritual powers, and enjoying 
happy and intimate fellowship with one another 
and with their Father in heaven, 


XIX 


FORGETTING THE CLEANSING 


*‘For he that lacketh these things is blind, seeing only what is 
near, having forgotten the cleansing from his old sins.”— 
2 PETER i. 9. 


“HE that lacketh these things.” What things? 
The radiant treasures are named in a previous 
verse: faith, virtue, knowledge, temperance, 
patience, godliness, love of the brethren, love. 
“He that lacketh these things is blind.” His 
spiritual outlook is obstructed by a dense and 
earthborn cloud. “Seeing only what is near ”— 
he has lost the sense of the heavenly, the per- 
ception of what is ideal and divine—“ having 
forgotten the cleansing.” Let us grasp the order 
of the apostle’s thought. “ Having forgotten the 
cleansing.” That is not the ultimate consequence ; 
it is the primary cause. It is not the last fruitage 
of a prolonged degeneracy ; it is the original root. 
The “lack” and the “blindness” do not create 


248 FORGETTING THE CLEANSING 


the forgetfulness ; they are created byit. “ Having | 
forgotten the cleansing.” That is the starting- 
point of the appalling deterioration. Certain 
primary matters are permitted to pass into oblivion. 
Great cardinal truths are erased from the active 
consciousness, The battery of the man’s creed 
loses some of its most powerful cells. Elements 
are submerged in which reside the secrets of life. 
Theology is devitalised. ‘“ Having forgotten the 
cleansing.” What follows? Impoverish your 
creed, and you sterilise your morality. There 
will be a “lack” in “these things.” Graces will 
be reluctantly pursued, and only scantily possessed. 
A devitalised theology creates a disabled and 
dispirited morality. “Having forgotten,” he 
“lacks,” What follows? Chilled morality 
results in impaired visions. Men who cease to 
pursue the ideal, speedily cease to see it. “He 
that lacketh is blind, seeing only what is near.” 
He sees the small policy, the mean expedient, the 
earthly and the transient. “Seeing only what is 
near,’ he has no sense of the heavenly. The 
divine aspects of things have faded out of his sight. 
He has lost the ideal. That is the order and 
succession of the apostolic thought. A devitalised 
theology is succeeded by a disabled morality, 
which speedily issues in the obscuration of the 


FORGETTING THE CLEANSING 249 


ideal. “Having forgotten,” he “lacks” and is 
“ blind.” 

“ Having forgotten.” Forgottenwhat? “The 
cleansing.” In the New Testament there is a 
recognised gradation in the importance of duties. 
Some of the commandments are described as 
“least,” and others as “greatest.” There is a 
similar gradation recognised in the importance of 
truths. There are. truths which are regarded as 
primary, radical, fundamental, pre-eminent sources 
of holy energy, centres from which radiate the 
driving power of all assured and progressive 
spiritual life. Predominant among these primary 
truths are the truths concerning “the cleansing.” 
Our fathers used to call them the “ saving truths,” 
not that any truth is devoid “of saving and 
emancipating power, but that these truths are 
immediately and superlatively concerned with the 
deepest and most appalling need in human life. 
“T delivered unto you first of all” the truths 
concerning the “cleansing”; “first of all,” as of 
primary and unspeakable import, “Christ died 
for our sins”; “first of all,” as radical and 
alphabetic, in which everything which seeks to be 
positive and enduring must take its root, “He 
was delivered for our offences, and was raised 
again for our justification.” You know the exalted 


250 FORGETTING THE CLEANSING 


eminence which these truths occupied in the 
teachings of the Apostle Paul. The space they 
fill in his epistles is indicative of the conspicuous 
authority which they exercised in his life. He 
could not keep away from the glorious themes. 
They possessed and held him by a strange and ever- 
increasing fascination. He lived and moved and 
had his being among the sublimities. “He dwelt 
on high; his place of defence was the munition 
of rocks.” He was always “from above,” never 
from beneath. He approached everything from 
lofty altitudes, and everything he touched was 
sublimed. He came to the commonplace from 
the blood of the cleansing, and the commonplace 
stood transformed. His base of operations was 
back in the saving truths, and to these he ever 
returned for reinforcement and renewal. The 
glorious mystery of the atoning death; the 
certainty of reconciliation; the assurance of 
forgiveness ; the possibility of salvation for all 
men; these are the cardinal truths which formed 
the gospel of the Apostle Paul, and which run 
like an unbroken strain of music though all the 
changing complexities of his intensely varied life. 
“ First of all,” proclaimed the Apostle Paul, “ Christ 
died for our sins.” “First of all,” repeats the 
Apostle Peter, “Christ hath once suffered for 


FORGETTING THE CLEANSING 251 


sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring 
us to God.” “ First of all,” cries the Apostle John, 
“The blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us 
from all sin.” These are the primary truths con- 
cerning the cleansing which formed the staple and 
the emphasis of apostolic ministry, and these are 
the truths which, with glad and passionate eager- 
ness, they published to a sin-bound, saddened and 
soddened world. 

Now, what did they claim for the Word? They 
claimed that the truth was a gospel of power, the 
“power of God unto Salvation.” These truths 
were declared to be force-centres, creative of 
impulse and motive, with power to change dead, 
inert, and sluggish lives into passionate activity 
and enthusiasm. The truths were offered to the 
world as dynamic cells, forming the battery of a 
mighty, active creed, which would instil energy 
into every activity in the entire circuit of the 
life. Yes, that is the word they used. Truth 
“energises.” “The word of God worketh in you.” 
“The implanted word, which is able to save your 
souls.” Get these truths implanted within you; 
get them enthroned in the conscience as dominant 
conceptions ; let them be bold and vivid presences 
in the chamber of your imagery, and a strong, 
saving, cleansing energy shall pervade your moral 


"252 FORGETTING THE CLEANSING 


and spiritual being like a pure and vitalising 
current of healthy blood. This is what the 
apostles claimed for the truth they taught. They 
claimed that it would energise the conscience, 
and purge it from uncleanness. They claimed 
that it would energise the will, and endow a 
fickle, wavering reed with the staying power of 
adamant. They claimed that it would energise 
the emotions, and transform a mean, sluggish, 
dribbling affection into the serviceable passion of 
a mighty stream. They claimed that it would 
energise the entire being, arousing the dormant 
spiritual cravings, quickening a healthy appetite, 
yea,a hunger and a thirst for righteousness, and a 
jealous watchfulness for the companionship of the 
Lord. And how they laboured to enthrone it! 
With what persistence they sought to give “the 
cleansing ” great and isolated glory! With what 
varied ministry they sought to preserve its re- 
membrance clear, vivid, intense, and influential ! 
How jealously they watched to save it from 
oblivion! “To write the same things to you, to 
me indeed is not irksome, and for you it is safe.” 
“T shall be ready always to put you in re- 
membrance of these things.” ... “I will en- 
deavour that you may be able after my decease to 
have these things always in remembrance.” . . 


FORGETTING THE CLEANSING 253 


“Do this in remembrance.” ... That was the 
burden and the glory of the apostle’s work, to 
keep “the cleansing” in remembrance. That is 
what they would have called their “ practical” 
service. But take any ordinary commentary on 
the great epistles, say on the Epistle to the 
Romans, and mark its analysis of the apostle’s 
thought, and not until you reach the twelfth 
chapter will you find the section headed “ Practical.” 
But what of the great reach of urgent, palpitating 
thought which stretches across the previous 
eleven? Eleven chapters devoted to placarding 
the great truth concerning “the cleansing”! 
Perhaps, after all, this is the section that should 
be named the practical. It is infinitely more than 
theory. It is root, it is spring, it is life! Get 
the eleven chapters exalted and enthroned, let 
the truths become abiding factors in the conscious- 
ness, let them be contemplated until contempla- 
tion becomes conviction, and musing creates fire, 
let them become possessed until they possess 
you, and the graces of chapter twelve will arise 
as an eager and spontaneous issue. Remember 
the cleansing. Let the primary truths have the 
primary place; let them be princes in the con- 
scious life; and the princes of consciousness will 
appear as principles in conduct, filling life with 


254 FORGETTING THE CLEANSING 


moral passion and enthusiasm, and converting a 
reluctant drudgery into an exultant freedom. 

But, now, obliterate the energising truth. Let 
it be exiled from the consciousness. Let the 
cleansing be forgotten. Blot out the first eleven 
chapters to the Romans. Begin with the twelfth. 
Begin with what you call the practical. What 
then? The practical will become the impracti- 
cable. You cannot expunge the theology and 
retain the morality. You cannot make the 
starting-point of the Epistle to the Galatians at 
the end of chapter v.the culture of the fruits— 
and ignore or renounce the previous chapters, 
which contain the root. Why, if the Epistle to 
the Galatians means anything at all, it is a 
passionate appeal and warning to men, out of 
whose minds the primary truth was fading, and in 
whose lives moral enthusiasm was declining. They 
had begun their religious life in the “power” of 
the Gospel. The great truths of “the cleansing” 
had energised them with healthy, moral passion. 
“Ye did run well!” Why, then, this panting, 
this fainting, this reluctance, this slow indifferent 
step, this moral “lack”? They had “ forgotten 
the cleansing”! We are to be able to “stand” 
—firm, strong, and irresistible—when our loins 
are “girt about with truth.” But if we take 


FORGETTING THE CLEANSING 255 


off the belt, if we ignore it, if we renounce it, 
the soul loses its vigour, it sinks into moral 
laxity, and becomes sluggish, undecided, and 
limp. 

We have abundant confirmation of the sequence 
in the history of the Christian centuries. The 
principle is this—dethrone the cleansing, and you 
chill the passion for perfectness ; exalt the cleans- 
ing, and moral enthusiasm becomes abounding. 
Go back to the years which preceded the emergence 
of the Protestant faith. A sacerdotal ceremonialism 
had eclipsed the gospel of cleansing. Religious 
life was corrupt and corrupting, because the inter- 
preters of religion had lost the key. The Christian 
doctrine of grace was obliterated and forgotten. 
With the doctrine of grace there had gone into 
oblivion the companion doctrine of sin. Grace 
being exiled, graces became scant. The great 
cleansing was forgotten. The sense of sin was 
dulled. Shame died. Morality became sluggish 
and unclean. The sequence of forgetfulness was 
lack. Protestantism tore down the ceremonial 
veil. It brushed aside the obscuring legends. It 
rediscovered and reaffirmed the doctrine of grace. 
It published anew the gospel of “the cleansing.” 
“ First of all, Christ died for our sins.” “ We are 
reconciled to God by the death of His Son.” “In 


256 FORGETTING THE CLEANSING 


Christ we have redemption through His blood, 
even the forgiveness of sins.” That was the 
primary burden of Protestantism. And what 
was the issue? Conscience was quickened. The 
sense of sin was revived. The chilled passion 
for perfectness was rekindled and reinflamed. 
Reformation became an enthusiasm. Out of 
Protestantism came Puritanism—ay, came as 
natural in its emergence as the emergence of the 
twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth chapters of 
Romans from the great body of cardinal, primary 
truth which precedes them; and whatever one 
might say about Puritanism, however severely 
critics may disparage it for its supposed narrowness, 
let it be remembered that it was the narrowness 
of power, a healthy recoil from the impotence of 
diffuseness—the narrowness of the mill-stream, a 
concentration for more abundant labours in the 
service of God and man. Protestantism made 
Puritanism. A revitalised theology created a re- 
empowered and impassioned morality. 

Now, come down the generations to the early 
years of the eighteenth century. Primary truth 
had again become obscured. The great cleansing 
was forgotten. The creed of the Puritans was 
erased, and had ceased to be a controlling and 
pervading factor in the consciousness of the 


FORGETTING THE CLEANSING 257 


personal life. With the obliteration of cardinal 
truth there came the disparagement of the ten 
commandments. The current of moral life ran 
slow and unclean. The entire nation was pos- 
sessed by the laxity. Our prominent statesmen 
were notoriously and grossly impure. Literature 
had lost its wings, and no longer soared into the 
ideal. The masses of the people were ignorant, 
brutal, and debased. They had “forgotten the 
cleansing,” and the sequence was a terrible “lack.” 
Then came the early Methodists with the great 
awakening. What was the message which effected 
the rousing? The exiled gospel, the obliterated 
truth, the forgotten cleansing. “ First of all, 
Christ died for our sins.” Grace! Sin! Faith! 
Life! These were the projecting emphases around 
which gathered the speech of the evangelical re- 
vival. Says George Whitfield in his journal: 
“This sermon, under God, began the awakening 
at Gloucester, Bristol, and London.” And what 
was the sermon about? “The nature and 
necessity of regeneration in Christ.” The sermon 
which forms the introductory discourse in John 
Wesley’s published volumes of theology reveals 
the keynote of his extraordinary ministry. These 
men uncovered the veiled and buried truth ; they 


proclaimed the great doctrines of “ the cleansing,” 
s 


258 FORGETTING THE CLEANSING 


and from the moors of wild Northumberland to 
the more genial haunts of Cornwall and Devon 
vast multitudes of men and women turned their 
faces heavenward, recoiling from the uncleanness 
in which they wallowed, in a passionate longing 
for the purity and sweetness of the Lord. 

Come further down the centuries to our im- 
mediate time. What is the religious phenomenon 
of our own day which remains undimmed even 
when placed by the side of the great evangelical 
revival? Is it an illegitimate emphasis to ascribe 
that glory to the Salvation Army? What is it 
that confronts us when we open our eyes? A 
vast army of men and women distributed all over 
the world, the majority of whom were in the grip 
of the vulgarest devils, morally barren and un- 
fruitful, sin-soaked and spirit-bound, but who are 
now rejoicing in a passionate hunger for holiness 
and truth. How do you account for it? Here 
they are, round about us in our land, men and 
women with an enthusiasm for self-denial which 
puts the more reputable Church to shame; men 
and women who were once grovelling in the mire, 
but who are now fitted to take their place by the 
sea of glass, among the vast multitude who have 
“gotten the victory over the beast.” What is the 
secret of the great awakening? The remembrance 


FORGETTING THE CLEANSING 259 


of the great cleansing! All intermediaries, both 
of ritual and tradition, have been brushed aside, 
and they have been brought face to face with 
“the blood of the cleansing,’ with the unspeak- 
able grace and love of the reconciling Lord. 


Bearing shame and scoffing rude, 
In my place condemned He stood, 
Sealed my pardon with His blood. 


That is the secret of the Salvation Army, and 
from that secret proceeds the passionate moral 
energy which by abundant labours is serving the 
ends of the world. 

This has been the secret power of the Christian 
centuries, and its submergence has been the ex- 
planation of all moral decline. Exalt the doctrines 
of grace, and you create the hunger for God. Let 
the truths of the cleansing be received and vividly 
retained, and graces will spring in abundance, 
Let this realisation possess the personal conscious- 
ness, “ He loved me, and gave Himself for me,” 
and the realisation will itself create a moral energy 
which will exultingly declare, “I can do all 
things through Christ which strengtheneth me.” 
But let the great truths be erased or ignored—let 
the cleansing be forgotten, and forgetfulness will 
issue in lack, moral enthusiasm will sink into 


260 FORGETTING THE CLEANSING 


indifference, into an apathetic contentment with 
the unclean ways and fashions of the world. 

“ Forgetfulness of the cleansing”; moral laxity. 
What is the ultimate issue? “Blindness.” What 
we cease to crave for we cease to see. When 
moral passion cools, moral ideals fade, or we 
see “only what is near.” We become near- 
sighted, weak-sighted, blind to the things that are 
afar off. We lose the vision of the ideal, the 
heavenly, the eternal. We see only what is near, 
the earthly and the temporal. When the passion 
for perfection becomes lukewarm and cold, we 
become more concerned with postures than with 
depositions, with temporalities more than with 
spiritualities, with a good living more than a good 
life. We see only what is near, and are blind to 
that which is afar off. Foreign missions, if they 
appeal to us at all, appeal as the ministries of 
a more extended commerce, the pioneers in the 
creation of multiplied centres of trade. We are 
blind to the heavenly and the divine. The work 
of the Lord presents itself as a nice expediency, 
and not as a glorious and tremendous privilege 
and obligation. We cannot see! Life, having 
lost its background, loses its foreground. Having 
lost the saving truth, we lose the ideal. Forget- 
ting “the cleansing,” we become blind. We become 


FORGETTING THE CLEANSING 261 


dominated by the earthly, and the heavenly be- 
comes as an impotent fiction lost somewhere in 
the encircling mists. 

That is the order and succession of this appal- 
ling degeneracy,—forgetfulness of grace, moral 
laxity, lost ideal. Turn the matter round. If 
we are to see clearly, if we are to behold the 
heavenly, to appreciate it, to be responsive to the 
allurements of the ideal and the eternal, our moral 
life must be a passionate enthusiasm, and for a 
passionate enthusiasm the consciousness needs to 
be possessed by the great energising truths of the 
cleansing. Is it here that we are wanting? In 
this great matter of Christian missions have we 
clear sight? Do we see them as the Lord sees 
them? Do we see the ideal and the heavenly, 
and does it allure? Or do we only see the things 
that are near? Have we forgotten the cleansing ? 
The conditions of power remain unchanged. Let 
us get nearer the springs. Let us reaffirm the great 
cleansing. Let us startle the world with surprises 
of grace. “ How beautiful upon the mountains are 
the feet of Him that bringeth good tidings, that 
publisheth peace.” “Comfort ye, comfort ye My 
people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably 
to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare 
is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned.” 


XX 


THE SECRETS OF EFFECTIVE 
PREACHING 


An Address on preaching delivered before the Free Church 
Congress, Cardiff, March 1901. 


I AM happy to think that in the discharge of the 
duty which I have undertaken to-day there are 
two things which, even if I possessed them, would 
be sorely and painfully out of place. This is no 
occasion for the artifices of a swelling rhetoric, nor 
does our subject afford any welcome to the exer- 
cises of jesting. When a body of men is assembled 
for the purpose of considering the apparent in- 
efficacy of their preaching, the proper atmosphere 
for such deliberations is to be found, not in the 
light excitabilities of a public meeting, but in the 
deep and awe-inspiring solemnities of public 
worship. We must approach the great theme in 
the attitude of groping supplicants, and not with 
the presumptuous steps of detached and distant 


SECRETS OF EFFECTIVE PREACHING 263 


critics. We shall see further if we are upon our 
knees. Our vision may be intensified by peni- 
tential tears. Our questions must be asked in the 
spirit of eager worship. Our self-examination 
must be made in the light of His countenance. 
We must “inquire in His temple.” 

The preacher, what is he? Behind the one 
word “ preacher ” of the New Testament Scriptures 
there are half a dozen original words, each with 
its own distinctive suggestion, each contributing 
its own item of colour to the description of the 
mighty office. The preacher is a herald, a public 
crier, a man with an imperial proclamation, charged 
with a message which must be announced from 
the house-tops with all the urgency of a sovereign 
command. The preacher is an evangelist, with a 
message which is almost a song, full of sweetness 
and of light, the speech of the wooer, laden with 
tenderness, and bright with the promise of glad- 
some days. The preacher is a /ogician, engaged 
in strenuous reasonings, seeking to gather together 
the loose and incoherent thoughts of men, and 
bind them into firm and well-knit spiritual decision. 
And the preacher is a conversationalist, who some- 
times lays aside the spacious function of the public 
minister, and, discarding the formalities of linked 
and well-connected discourse, engages in homely 


264 SECRETS OF EFFECTIVE PREACHING 


intercourse, in fireside speech with his fellow-men 
Such is the variously coloured office which lies be- 
hind the complex and suggestive word “ preacher.” 
We must take the essential significances of a king’s 
herald, a tender wooer, a strong logician, and a 
familiar friend, and in their wealthy combination 
we shall obtain a vision of the ideal preacher of 
the gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. 
The preacher, what is his function? Let us 
rehearse a classic passage from the Epistle to the 
Romans. “Whosoever shall call upon the name 
of the Lord shall be saved. How then shall they 
call on Him in whom they have not believed ? 
and how shall they believe in Him of whom they 
have not heard? and how shall they hear with- 
out a preacher?” Reverse the order of the 
sequence. How then runs the vital procession ? 
Preaching, hearing, believing, calling, saving! 
What are the extreme terms of the series? 
Preaching, saving. The ultimate aim of all true 
preaching is the salvation of men. Salvation 
from what? Salvation from sin? Yes. Salva- 
tion from hell? Yes. Salvation from infirmity? 
Yes. From moral stuntedness and spiritual im- 
maturity? Yes. From all arrested growth in 
the direction of the divine? Yes. The strenuous 
purpose of all vital preaching is to lift men out of 


SECRETS OF EFFECTIVE PREACHING 265 


the bondage of sin and dwarfhood, and to set 
them in the fine spacious air and light of the 
free-born children of God. 

1. Now, here let us begin our quest into the 
comparative inefficacy of our preaching, and may 
the Holy Spirit illumine for us the secret chambers 
of our life. Do we keenly realise the horrors of the 
bondage from which we seek to deliver men? Has 
sin become a commonplace? Does it no longer 
fill us with poignant pain? Has it shed some 
of its loathsomeness, and has our repulsion been 
relaxed? Can we now toy with terrors before 
which our fathers shrank aghast? The questions 
are surely not altogether irrelevant, and may be 
warranted by many of the conditions in which we 
are placed. There is proceeding in our time a 
certain toning-down of language, which may be 
wise or unwise, but which is not altogether without 
suggestion. We do not like some of the stern, 
bare, jagged words which our fathers used in their 
description of sin. And so we are very busy filing 
and smoothing the sharp edges, and diluting their 
somewhat loud and glaring colour. I am not 
afraid of changes in phraseology if the change do 
not indicate a degeneracy from decisive strength 
into a mincing dilettantism. |The substituted 
word may be more cultured and refined, but if its 


266 SECRETS OF EFFECTIVE PREACHING 


content be thin and impoverished, I am afraid of 
the change. “Vile and full of sin I am.” The 
word “vile” may offend my ears, but what is the 
reason of the offence? When I see the excision of 
the word “vile,” and the substitution of the word 
“weak,” I am afraid of the tendency, because it 
seems to suggest a relaxing of our conceptions of 
the enormity of sin. “A guilty, poor, and help- 
less worm, on Thy kind arms I fall.” I may not 
like the severe and humbling term “worm,” but 
what is the reason of my dislike? Is it that I 
have acquired a less stringent conception of sin, 
and are these graphic terms too bold and severe? 
Do we require a milder phraseology because our 
enemy is less appalling? Is the yearning for 
more exquisite refinement the expression of 
spiritual culture and growth, or is it the evidence 
of partial benumbment? The answer must be 
found in the secret places of the individual life. 
There is a fountain filled with blood 
Drawn from Emmanuel’s veins ; 


And sinners, plunged beneath that flood, 
Lose all their guilty stains. 


I tell you frankly I don’t like the figure which 
runs through the verse. There are many to 
whom it is almost offensive. Its elaboration 
creates almost a repulsion. But while I dislike 


SECRETS OF EFFECTIVE PREACHING 267 


the figure, I want my dislike to be safe and 
illumined. If I drop the particular phraseology, I 
want to retain the tremendous sense of sin which 
lies behind it. If I refine the word, I don’t want 
to gild the sin. If I obtain a more cultured 
vehicle, I want it to express the same horrible 
and loathsome presence. I covet no phraseology 
which will lend respectability to sin. It is 
possible to obtain finer poetry at the expense of 
convicting power. We may intensify the polish 
and glitter and lose the lightning. Polished and 
dilettante speech will not satisfy us if we are 
profoundly held by a sense of the exceeding 
bitterness and loathsomeness of sin. Does that 
sense pervade our preaching? Do we impress 
the people with the feeling that we are dealing 
with trifles, or with blinding and appalling 
enormities? There is a word in the Book of 
Ezekiel which often rings through my soul when - 
I am preparing the message for my people. 
“And he called to the man clothed with linen, 
which had the writer’s inkhorn by his side; and 
the Lord said unto him, Go through the midst of 
the city, through the midst of Jerusalem, and set 
a mark upon the foreheads of the men that sigh 
and that cry, for all the abominations that be done 
in the midst thereof.” “Set a mark upon all that 


268 SECRETS OF EFFECTIVE PREACHING 


sigh and that cry” for the sin of the city. Upon 
how many of our foreheads would the man with 
the inkhorn set his mark? “That sigh!” It is 
a secret pain. It expresses itself in involuntary 
sighs. Whenever the thought crosses the mind, 
it throws a cold shadow over the heart. “And 
when He beheld the city, He wept over it.” 
“And that cry.” It shapes and colours their 
prayers. You can find their profound sense of 
the world’s sin in the nature of their supplications. 
They cannot keep it out of their prayers. Are 
we so crushed and burdened by the horrors of sin? 
Is it the staple of our prayers? Is it the burden 
of our sighs? Does it ever cause the loss of an 
hour’s sleep? Or is sin an unaffrighting and 
undisturbing commonplace with which we have 
become so familiar that it never startles us into 
pain? If sin has become a commonplace, our 
preaching has become a plaything. If we do not 
feel its horrors, we shall lose the startling clarion 
of the watchman. There will be no urgency in 
our speech, no vehemence, no sense of imperious 
haste. If we think lightly of the disease, we shall 
loiter on the way to the physician. If we do not 
feel the heat of the consuming and destructive 
presence, we shall not labour, with undivided zeal, 
to pluck our fellow-men as brands from the 


tt 


SECRETS OF EFFECTIVE PREACHING 269 


burning. If our sense of sin is lax, we may find 
in that laxity one of the causes of ineffective 
preaching. 

2. Are we possessed of a spirit of sensitive 
sympathy? {. am not surprised that in his 
enumeration of the graces of a sanctified life the 
Apostle should put in the primary place a heart 
of pity. “Put ye on compassion.” It is part of 
the essential equipment of every true preacher of 
the gospel of Christ, and it is a part of our equip- 
ment which may be most easily and perilously 
destroyed. It is one of the gravest perils of the 
Christian ministry that we are in such continuous 
and imminent danger of losing the power of our 
compassion. When first I entered the Christian 
ministry I used to have a wondering fear whether 
my untried faith would be able to bear continual 
revelations of suffering and sorrow and bereave- 
ment and death. Would my sensitive sympathy 
engender painful doubt and encourage spiritual 
revolt? But now the problem has been altogether 
changed. The searching question is not now 
whether my faith can persist through continued 
manifestations of the darker experiences of life, 
but whether my faith can keep alive through a 
calm and undisturbing familiarity with them. 
We have to be familiar with experiences whose 


270 SECRETS OF EFFECTIVE PREACHING 


infrequent visits bring benediction and softening 
influence to others. That which makes the rainy 
season in other lives constitutes our drought. An 
infrequent contact with sorrow may enrich the 
compassions ; constant familiarity with it tends to 
dry them up. In my early ministry my heart 
used to melt at every funeral over which I had to 
preside. I could not read the burial service 
without tears. It may be that it is part of the 
gracious ministry of God that with the process of 
the years this burden should be eased, but I do 
not want the ease if it means the loss of a sensitive 
compassion. I would rather covet the tears, and 
the choked speech, and a body tired and drained 
twice and thrice a week, than enter into a 
familiarity with sorrow which estranges me from 
the sore and stricken hearts of my fellow-men. 
If our compassion fail, our power is gone. If we 
do not feel with our fellows, we shall never be 
their guide. “Though I speak with the tongues 
of men and of angels, and have not love, I am 
nothing.” If I lose my sympathy, I lose my 
- vision. Sympathy is the parent of discernment ; 
the finer the sympathy, the more exquisite the 
discernment. ‘“ When he was yet a long way off, 
his father saw him.” That is the kind of vision 


which as a preacher I covet: the fine, sensitive 


' 


: 
; 


SECRETS OF EFFECTIVE PREACHING 271 


sympathy which can discern the first faint stirrings 
in a brother man’s heart when he is just inclining 
towards the divine. Before the divine movement 
in his soul is expressed in speech, before it is even 
registered in his face, nay, when the face indicates 
rather a sterner revolt than an incipient surrender, 
when the man is yet “a long way off,” I want to 
feel the remote awakening by the power of an 
exquisite compassion. If men can feel that we 
know their very breathings, and that we thrill to 
the deepest and most secret movements of their 
spirits, they will suffer us to be their guides and 
friends. But if our compassions are dried, our 
people will know our benumbment, and our 
preaching will fall like a shower of hard gravel 
rather than as a shower of soft and refreshing 
rain. If our familiarity with the shadow has im- 
poverished our compassion, let us get the stream 
renewed. “In His love and in His pity He 
redeemed them.” A reverent intimacy with the 
Lord will deliver us from the hardening influence 
of ceaseless familiarity with grief. He will 
“come down like rain.” He will “open rivers 
in high places, and fountains in the midst of the 
valleys.” “The desert shall become a pool, 
and the dry land springs of water.” If we 
have lost our sensitive sympathy, we may find 


272 SECRETS OF EFFECTIVE PREACHING 


in the loss some explanation of our ineffective 
preaching. 

3. Is the wooing note present in our preaching ? 
—lIf we do not realise the horrors of sinful bond- 
age, and sympathise with the bound, the tender 
notes of the lover and the wooer will be absent 
from our speech. Is not our preaching too un- 
brokenly severe? Is there not too much that 
savours of the judgment-seat, and too little that 
breathes the winsomeness of the fireside? “Out 
of the throne proceeded lightnings and thunder- 
ings.” Yes; but out of the throne there 
proceeded also “a pure river of water of life, 
clear as crystal,” the soft, tender, healing, sustain- 
ing influences of grace. I think that in our 
teaching and preaching the thunder and lightning 
are apt to be more frequently conspicuous than 
the gracious shining river. We want more 
tenderness in our speech, the tones of love and 
of sensitive yearning. We want less scolding 
and more pleading, less driving and more wooing. 
“ Compel them to come in.” I am glad that the 
somewhat harsh word has been excised from the 
Revised Version, and that in its place we have 
the soft and welcome word “constrain.” “ Con- 
strain them to come in.” Woo them into the 
kingdom! Go back to your wooing days; think 


SECRETS OF EFFECTIVE PREACHING 273 


of all the little devices—all of them legitimate— 
employed in order to woo the affections of the one 
you loved. Think, too, of the little tendernesses 
paid, all the kindly abounding services rendered, 
when even the flickering response seemed to be 
a repulse. How you multiplied your attentions 
and nursed the gracious awakening! Every 
great preacher is a wooer. If we turn to the 
Old Testament Scriptures, we might expect the 
wooing note to be absent. Amos is severe 
in speech, stern in expostulations, multiplying 
his denunciations, yet you find that even stern, 
thundering Amos sometimes lays aside his thunder 
and begins to woo. And as for Hosea, he is the 
wooer from beginning to end. Turn to Isaiah, 
and at the end of the chapter in which there is 
poured out abounding denunciation and woe you 
will find that he lays it all aside and begins with, 
“Comfort ye, comfort ye my people.” He was 
a great wooer. We need to woo our people. 
“Jesus, lover of my soul.” Preacher, lover of 
man’s soul! Let us speak a little more tenderly. 
Let us drop out the thunder and put in the 
constraint, and where the thunder has failed the 
lover may succeed. Not only in the Old Testa- 
ment Scriptures, but right through the Bible, you 


will find this wooing and constraining note. I 
T 


274 SECRETS OF EFFECTIVE PREACHING 


am perfectly sure it has been too absent from 
my ministry. Months ago I determined that 
there should be more of the tender lover in my 
pulpit speech, more of the wooing note of the 
Apostle Paul, more of the gentleness and tender 
constraint of my Lord. 

4. Let me ask one other question. Has our 
teaching and preaching the New Testament em- 
phasis? You think I ought to put that first. 
I do not want to put it first, and I will tell you 
why. I do not want to give it undue emphasis, 
lest I appear to suspect my brethren. I do not 
think they are far away from the great cardinal 
verities of the Christian faith. I believe they 
are very near the centre, and they keep to what 
they conceive to be the primary realities of our 
religion. But even though we be agreed upon it 
in our own practice, there is no harm just here to 
re-emphasise our belief and practice. Wherever in 
the Scriptures the preacher has to proclaim great 
and imperative duty, it always finds its root very 
near to the Cross. When the Apostle Paul is 
proclaiming what appears to be a commonplace 
duty, he goes back for the roots right to Calvary’s 
Tree. “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ 
also loved the Church, and gave Himself for it.” 
And if he is talking about the eating of meats, 


SECRETS OF EFFECTIVE PREACHING 275 


he proclaims his injunction from the Cross. “ De- 
stroy not him with thy meat for whom Christ 
died?’ When he is proclaiming a duty he links 
it to the Crucifixion, to the crucified Christ. He 
drives all his duties home with the power of the 
Gospel of the crucified Christ. All his tools are 
armed with one nandle. I do not know anything 
more ineffective and more provoking than to have 
a gimlet with no handle to it. You cannot drive 
a pricker far without a handle, and you cannot 
get a gimlet into the wood without a handle; and 
you cannot drive a duty, you cannot prick man’s 
conscience to the very core, unless you handle the 
duty as Paul handled it, and drive it home by 
the power of the crucified Christ. And, there- 
fore, I put the searching question, Have we got 
that emphasis in our teaching, and do we make 
it quite clear and apparent? When we have 
proclaimed a duty, is the dynamic just as mani- 
fest? When we present an ideal, are the resources 
as conspicuous? Do we link all our imperatives 
to the power of the Gospel of Christ? 

One other question, and I have done. My 
brethren in the ministry, do we appreciate our 
own message? Do we look as though we revelled 
in it? There is nothing so helps a man toa 
good meal as to sit down with a man who enjoys 


276 SECRETS OF EFFECTIVE PREACHING 


a good appetite. And there is nothing so allur- 
ing to people, when we desire to show them how 
gracious the Lord is, as to let them see we revel 
in the diet. “Blessed is the man whose delight 
is in the law of the Lord.” And why is he 
blessed? Because his delight is contagious, his 
enthusiasm is catching. When we see a man 
bubbling over and delighting in God, we our- 
selves begin to be unsealed. A minister’s 
enthusiasm will be found contagious among his 
people. “Thy word is sweet.” When we say 
it, do we look as if we knew it? “Thy word 
is sweet.” Do we proclaim the sentence with a 
sour face? “My meditation of Him shall be 
sweet.” When our people see that we delight in 
the feast, they will sit down at the same table. 
Let us, in conclusion, subject ourselves to a 
rigorous cross-examination. Do I hate all sin? 
“The fear of the Lord is to hate evil.” Do I 
feel sin to be loathsome? Am I possessed of a 
tender sensitiveness, that can discern even the 
faintest movings in the hearts of my people, and 
which will reveal to me their inclinations long 
before they receive any outward expression? 
And, Lord Jesus, have I been a wooer, a lover, 
and are any in Thy kingdom because they were 
just enticed into it by the tender persuasiveness 


SECRETS OF EFFECTIVE PREACHING 277 


of my life and speech? And have I linked the 
proclamation of duties to the love of Calvary? 
And has my teaching had New Testament per- 
spective and proportion, and have I evinced 
delight in my own message? May the Good 
Lord grant that to all these great questions we 
may be able to give an affirmative response ! 


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